A Roadmap for Sustainable Business Transformation

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Sustainability is a very complex paradigmatic concept comprised of multiple paradigms such as social, environmental, economic and more that challenges the traditional norms of organisational practices for daily and project activities. Businesses are tackling the ever-increasing difficulties of converting their establishment into sustainable entities. But there is a lack of generally accepted sustainability principles that is supported by most of the organisational stakeholders, and a pattern oriented methodology that is entirely backed by the organisational resources, in particular information systems. Most of the sustainability frameworks proposed by the sustainability and research bodies such as World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD), New Zealand Business Council on Sustainable Development (NZBCSD), Project SIGMA, IISD, UNEP, etc. are highly abstract and lack sufficient details to support the industry users without assistance from niche market sustainability consulting groups.

Some of the commonly used enterprise information systems support simulation, balanced scorecard and KPI analysis of business processes, but they focus predominantly on providing information that helps in managing organisations in a financially sound fashion. Processes and information to support organisations from the environmental, societal, cultural, and economic dimensions are either sparse or totally lacking. Despite professional assistance from sustainability experts, large businesses that have enterprise wide information systems still cannot apply sustainability ideas to the entire business system in a balanced or holistic fashion. Small to medium sized business cannot even think of putting in all the processes and information systems in place to capture, monitor, and manage metrics regarding sustainability dimensions. Hence there is an urgent need for sustainability frameworks to proactively include enterprise systems oriented aspects or at least provide guidelines to realise their implementation by these enterprise systems.

This research proposes a multi-level sustainability business transformation (SBT) roadmap that supports the business for maintaining a consistent conversion process of existing operations into sustainable operations. The roadmap consists of discover and strategise, design, transform and controls phases. It supports the entire sustainability transformation life cycle from the beginning of conceptualising the sustainability issues to the final implementation, monitoring and reporting of sustainability requirements. Key steps in this process are: 1) identification of sustainability strategies through sustainability model simulation, 2) orchestration of sustainable business scenarios, 3) gap analysis of AS-IS and TO-BE sustainable processes and workflow models, 3) reengineering, building and simulation of processes models, 4) gap analysis of data, organisation, function and control models, 5) transformation planning and improvements of organisational structures, roles, processes, and information systems and 6) monitoring and sustainability reporting. The roadmap supports continuous improvements of sustainability indicators. As part of this research we have also designed sustainability frameworks, architectures, and a prototype that validates the realisation of SBT roadmap. We have further tested our ideas using several real life business scenarios such as sustainable course delivery, sustainable transportation, and sustainable printing system of a tertiary educational institute.

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

M. Daud Ahmed is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Technology, Manukau Institute of Technology, Auckland New Zealand. He has varied academic (B.Sc. Engineering in Electrical and Electronics, MBA on Development Management, PG Dip in MSIS, M.Com. in MSIS) background and currently working on PhD on developing sustainability modelling and reporting framework. He has 20 years working experience on engineering design, implementation monitoring, management consultancy, systems analysis, design, development and implementation, and teaching and actively participated in planning and management of a number of engineering and social development projects that are funded and implemented by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, EEC, OPEC. He has research publications on framework and architecture of decision support systems, software project management, sustainability modelling, triple bottom line reporting, and systems development.

David Sundaram is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Business School, The University of Auckland. He has a varied academic (B.E. in Electronics & Communications, PG Dip in Industrial Engineering, and Ph.D. in Information Systems) as well as work (systems analysis and design, consulting, teaching, and research) background. His primary research interests include the 1) Design and Implementation of flexible and evolvable Information, Decision, and Knowledge Systems 2) Process, Information, and Decision Modelling 3) Triple Bottom Line Modelling and Reporting 4) Enterprise Application Integration with a focus on ERP-DSS integration.