Green Business Process Management

.
Jan vom Brocke • Stefan Seidel • Jan Recker
Editors

Green Business Process

Management
Towards the Sustainable Enterprise

Preface by Richard T. Watson

Editors
Jan vom Brocke Jan Recker
Stefan Seidel Queensland University of Technology
University of Liechtenstein Information Systems Discipline
Institute of Information Systems Brisbane, QLD
Vaduz Australia
Liechtenstein

ISBN 978-3-642-27487-9 e-ISBN 978-3-642-27488-6

DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-27488-6
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Foreword

Green is the new Black. Of course, not in the sense of a new fashion wave or the
go-to response for corporate branding efforts; but instead Green is epitomizing an
eco-aware movement that has pushed sustainability into the top ten list of business
movements in the new millennium.
What used to be a boutique market for tourism and political activists has become
probably the biggest business revolution since the e-commerce boom. Public and
private organizations alike push towards “sustainable” solutions and practices. That
push is partly triggered by the immense reputational gains associated with branding
your organization as “green,” and partly by emerging societal, legal, and constitu-
tional concerns and pressures that force and encourage organizations to become
economically, socially, and ecologically more sustainable.
MIT’s Peter Senge, for example, calls for the “necessary revolution” – one that is
not merely political but rather induces a paradigmatic shift towards a sustainable
economy. Obviously, challenges at a global level cannot be solved by rather reactive
solutions that target the mere symptoms rather than the underlying imbalances
and potential misbelieves. What is needed is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift.
Organizations are hence forced to also recognize the environmental implications of
resource consumption and social cost caused by their processes – the processes’
ecological and social footprint.
With this book, we intend to immerse deeper into the role of business processes
and their management in order to create an environmentally sustainable society.
Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a comprehensive solution
portfolio for businesses to improve performance as well as compliance of their
organizational work systems, and also has the power to innovate and continuously
transform businesses and cross-organizational value chains. While BPM has tradi-
tionally focused on economic imperatives, most notably time, cost, quality, and
flexibility, organizations now increasingly recognize its relevance for designing
and implementing “green” processes. Because of this potential, this book discusses
the emergent role of BPM in the context of ecological sustainability. We thus aim to
provide pioneers of the field with a forum where they disseminate their thoughts to
a broader audience.

v
vi Foreword

We wish to thank all authors for their valuable contributions to this book. Many
experts from the fields of Business Process Management and Information Systems
showed great enthusiasm to submit their work. It is our particular pleasure that
Richard T. Watson, who has been pioneering the area of Green IS and Energy
Informatics, provided a preface to this book. Rick’s contribution to the field has
been very influential to our own work. We would further like to thank Clemens
Malt and Kathi B€ uchel for their great support in editing this book and Christian
Rauscher at Springer, who has been of great support throughout the publishing
process.
We hope that you will enjoy the remainder of this book, find it inspirational, and
that it will serve you well in your own quest towards more environmental
sustainability in both your private and professional life.

Vaduz/Brisbane Jan vom Brocke

Stefan Seidel
Jan Recker
Preface

Humans have been designing processes for millions of years. The process for
creating a cutting instrument by striking a hammerstone against another rock to
create a sharp-edged flake is perhaps two million years old (Encyclopædia
Britannica Online, 2011a). If it is particularly useful, a new process is added to
the cultural repertoire of a society and passed on to successive generations.
The gradual accumulation of such processes over many years has created today’s
civilization. This development of a societal endowment of processes was inter-
twined with the development of information systems. In order for processes to be
used within one generation and inherited by another, there needs to be a means of
communicating a process from one person or group to another.
Gestures, a strong candidate for the first form of information system, appear to
be innate to humans (Tomasello, 2008). When in a country where we don’t speak
the language, we revert to pointing and posturing to communicate. Thus, we can
imagine one person using gestures to show another person how to use a hammer-
stone, much as we would do it today. When speech emerged some time after the
origin of gesturing, humans would have found it easier to communicate processes,
and might well have combined gestures and spoken commands to achieve process
transfer. Early process management in a subsistence economy was focused on
cultural transmission. Better processes (e.g., how to make fire or cook meat)
increased a tribe’s survival prospects. Though there were seemingly cases where
a society became so small it gradually lost its ability to transfer processes. For
example, the evidence suggests that when they became separated from mainland
Australia, the Tasmanian aboriginals over generations forgot the process for
making fire (Richerson & Boyd, 2004).
The emergence of agricultural economies layered a new dominant concern,
production, on top of survival. Farmers created a new set of processes centered
on production of crops and animals (e.g., how to plant a seed, how to care for a
cow). Writing paralleled the emergence of agricultural economies, as farming
societies needed to record and collect data to manage their affairs. Processes
(e.g., astronomical observation) were also developed to create calendars, a critical
information system for deciding when to plant a crop. Thus we see that new

vii
viii Preface

processes create a demand for supporting processes, and the accumulation of pro-
cesses multiplied. There is evidence of the earliest writing scripts being used to record
processes, such as medical procedures (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2011b).
This pattern of process accumulation continues throughout the agricultural era
and gained significant impetus with the arrival of industrial economies, beginning
in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. The focus still remained on
production, but the shift was from growing food to manufacturing goods, and we
saw a flourish of new production and transportation processes. Society had already
recognized the value of new processes. As early as 1421, a patent had been granted
in Italy, and the U.S. Constitution authorized Congress to establish a national patent
system (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2011c). The process of patenting
inventions is perhaps the beginning of the systematic process management. Society
had established a public way of describing processes and products.
As the industrial revolution accelerated, new information systems, which can be
thought of as bundles of integrated processes for conveying information, emerged.
Accounting, a set of processes for recording financial transactions and establishing
the value of assets and liabilities, is one of the new systems to materialize early in
the revolution, with the first chartered accounting society being established in
Edinburgh in 1854. Production is still a dominant societal issue, and today we see
elaborate process management systems in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) and Project Management Systems, among many others, that make today’s
production systems highly efficient.
Advanced economies are now ensconced in the service era, with for example
over 75% of U.S. workers employed in this sector. Service has become the
dominant logic for many firms (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). High quality service
requires the reliable execution of multiple processes over thousands of encounters
by many customer facing employees (e.g., a fast food store, an airline, a hospital).
Consequently, process management has grown in importance, and gained consid-
erable attention in the mid 1990s with the surge of interest in business process
reengineering (Hammer, 1990; Hammer & Champy, 1993). The field has pros-
pered, and the breadth and depth of scholarship on business process management
(BPM) is readily apparent in a recent compendium (vom Brocke & Rosemann,
2010a, 2010b).
As well as serving existing customers, firms are very concerned with how to
create new customers. There is an oversupply of many consumer products (e.g.,
cars) and companies compete to identify services and product features that will
attract customers. They are concerned with determining what types of customers to
recruit and finding out what they want. As a result, we have seen the rise of business
analytics and customer relationship management to address this dominant issue.
We are in transition to a new economy, sustainability, where the dominant
issue becomes one of assessing and mitigating environmental impacts because,
after several centuries of industrialization, atmospheric CO2 levels are causing
temperatures to rise, oceans to acidify, and icecaps to melt. Furthermore, we have
to learn how to use the limited resources of one planet to meet the needs of
six billion people with some level of equity within and across generations.
Preface ix

As a result, a new class of application is emerging, such as environmental manage-

ment systems, energy informatics (Watson, Boudreau, & Chen, 2010) and UPS’s
telematics project (Watson, Boudreau, Li, & Levis, 2010). These new systems will
also include, for example, support for understanding environmental impact through
simulation of energy consuming and production systems, optimization of energy
systems, and design of low impact production and customer service systems.
The preceding discussion is summarized in the following figure. Notice that
dominant issues do not disappear but rather aggregate in layers, so tomorrow’s
businesses will be concerned with survival, production, customer service, and
sustainability. Consequently, a firm’s need for BPM never diminishes, and each
new layer creates another set of process needs.

Table 1 Societal focus (Source: (Watson, forthcoming))

As we prepare to meet the demands of the sustainability era, it is very appropri-

ate that this book is published. It is one of the first books to recognize that BPM has
a critical role to play in creating a sustainable society. Society, across the various
types of economies, has shown an increasing concern for managing its processes,
and now it needs to be even more attentive to processes. We have learned that well
designed processes contribute to the efficient utilization of scarce resources. We
have also learned that processes can be redesigned to make dramatic reductions in
the use of resources. For example, U.S. based carpet manufacturer, Interfaces,
shifted from selling to leasing carpet, and a concomitant redesign of its business
processes led to recycling of discarded carpet rather than dumping it in a landfill
(Anderson, 1999). We have to learn how to redesign many aspects of contemporary
life to become a sustainable economy, and BPM will be a critical driver in this
redesign. Indeed, we need a set of meta processes for applying BPM to sustainability
problems. This book is an essential step in that direction.
x Preface

I warmly applaud Jan, Stefan, and Jan for their foresight in seeing the critical
connection between BPM and sustainability, and taking action to advance scholar-
ship on this linkage. We can thank them for their perspicacity by applying the many
sound ideas in this book to create a greener society.

Athens, Georgia, USA Richard T. Watson

Anderson, R. (1999). Mid-course correction: Toward a sustainable enterprise: The interface

model. Atlanta, GA: Peregrinzilla Press
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (2011a). Hand tool. Encyclopædia Britannica, from http://www.
britannica.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/EBchecked/topic/254115/hand-tool.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (2011b). History of publishing. Encyclopædia Britannica, from
http://www.britannica.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/EBchecked/topic/482597/publishing.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (2011c). Patent. Encyclopædia Britannica, from http://www.
britannica.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/EBchecked/topic/446287/patent.
Hammer, M. (1990). Reengineering work: Don’t automate, obliterate. Harvard Business Review,
68(4), 104–112.
Hammer, M., & Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the corporation. New York, NY: Harper.
Richerson, P., & Boyd, R. (2004). Not by genes alone : How culture transformed human evolution.
Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. The Journal of
Marketing, 68(1), 1–17. doi: citeulike-article-id:7899525.
vom Brocke, J., & Rosemann, M. (Eds.). (2010a). Handbook on business process management 1:
Introduction, methods, and information systems. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
vom Brocke, J., & Rosemann, M. (Eds.). (2010b). Handbook on business process management 2:
strategic alignment, governance, people and culture. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Watson, R. T. (forthcoming). Data management: databases and organizations (6th ed.). New
York: John Wiley.
Watson, R. T., Boudreau, M.-C., Li, S., & Levis, J. (2010). Telematics at UPS: En route to energy
informatics. MISQ Executive, 9(1), 1–11.
Watson, R. T., Boudreau, M., & Chen, A. (2010). Information systems and environmentally
sustainable development: Energy informatics and new directions for the IS community. MIS
Quarterly, 34(1), 23–38.
Contents

Part I Foundations and Directions

Green Business Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Stefan Seidel, Jan Recker, and Jan vom Brocke
Unpacking Green IS: A Review of the Existing Literature
and Directions for the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Stoney Brooks, Xuequn Wang, and Saonee Sarker
Unordered Business Processes, Sustainability and Green IS . . . . . . . . 39
Helen Hasan
Information Systems in Environmental Sustainability: Of Cannibals
and Forks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Dirk S. Hovorka, Elaine Labajo, and Nancy Auerbach

Part II Tools and Methods

Advancing Business Process Technology for Humanity: Opportunities

and Challenges of Green BPM for Sustainable Business Activities . . . 75
Constantin Houy, Markus Reiter, Peter Fettke, Peter Loos,
Konstantin Hoesch-Klohe, and Aditya Ghose
Modeling and Analyzing the Carbon Footprint of Business
Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Jan Recker, Michael Rosemann, Anders Hjalmarsson, and Mikael Lind
Managing Process Performance to Enable Corporate Sustainability:
A Capability Maturity Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Anne Cleven, Robert Winter, and Felix Wortmann
Measurement Systems for Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Nicole Zeise, Marco Link, and Erich Ortner

xi
xii Contents

Energy Informatics: Initial Thoughts on Data

and Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Richard T. Watson, Jeffrey Howells, and Marie-Claude Boudreau
Change the Game: Sustainability in Projects and Project
Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Gilbert Silvius

Part III Cases and Examples

The Potential of a Network-Centric Solution for Sustainability

in Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Hans Thies, Ali Dada, and Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva
Understanding the Maturity of Sustainable ICT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Edward Curry and Brian Donnellan
Ecosia.org: The Business Case of a Green Search Engine . . . . . . . . . . 217
Nils-Holger Schmidt, Thierry Jean Ruch, Jasmin Decker,
and Lutz M. Kolbe
Author Bibliographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247