Green business process management: towards the sustainable enterprise

- Preface by Richard T. Watson - Discusses the emerging challenges of designing “green” business processes - Presents tools and methods that organizations can use in order to design and implement environmentally sustainable processes - Provides insights from cases where organizations successfully engaged in more sustainable business practices Green Business Process Management – Towards the Sustainable Enterprise" consolidates the global state-of-the-art knowledge about how business processes can be managed and improved in light of sustainability objectives. Business organizations, a dominant part of our society, have always been a major contributor to the degradation of our natural environment, through the resource consumption, greenhouse emissions, and wastage production associated with their business processes. In order to lessen their impact on the natural environment, organizations must design and implement environmentally sustainable business processes. Finding solutions to this organizational design problem is the key challenge of Green Business Process Management. This book discusses the emerging challenges of designing “green” business processes, presents tools and methods that organizations can use in order to design and implement environmentally sustainable processes, and provides insights from cases where organizations successfully engaged in more sustainable business practices. The book is of relevance to both practitioners and academics who are interested in understanding, designing, and implementing “green” business processes. It also constitutes a valuable resource for students and lecturers in the fields of information systems, management, and sustainable development.

The journey of a ‘green’ micro-enterprise – The Green Planet

This teaching case explores the longitudinal evolution of a small environmental micro-enterprise, The Green Planet retail store. Exploring two decades of business history it analyses the development of this business as sustainability issues and greener consumer goods mainstreamed in society. The case presents one of the first explorations of the individual trade-offs that owners make between economic, environmental and social criteria, alongside an exploration of the role that the personal values of the owner played in the evolution of this business. Also presented is a sample of other environmental enterprises profiled alongside The Green Planet in the early 1990s. This additional dataset provides a rich resource for readers, and a number of indicative discussion themes are identified. Readers interested in topics such as marketing, business strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility and environmental management will find this case a valuable addition to their teaching resources.

From Subsistence Agriculture to Commercial Enterprise: Community management of green technologies for resilient food production

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the capacity and resilience of rural communities in regard to sustainable food security by adopting innovative approaches to irrigation. The shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture is promoted as a means to sustainable development. An analysis of the efficacy of irrigation schemes in Zimbabwe suggests that, in terms of providing sustainable agricultural production, they have neither been cost-effective nor have they provided long-term food security to their beneficiaries. This is certainly true of Shashe Scheme and most others in Beitbridge District. The Shashe Irrigation Scheme project represents a bold attempt at developing a fresh approach to the management of communal land irrigation schemes through a Private Public Community Partnership. The model illustrated represents a paradigm shift from subsistence agriculture to a system based on new technologies, market linkages and community ownership that build resilience and lead to sustainable food security and economic prosperity.

Green Business Process Management

In managing their operations, organizations have traditionally focused on economic imperatives in terms of time, cost, efficiency, and quality. In doing so, they have been a major contributor to environmental degradation caused by re-source consumption, greenhouse emissions, and wastage. As a consequence, or-ganizations are increasingly encouraged to improve their operations also from an ecological perspective, and thus to consider environmental sustainability as an additional management imperative. In order to lessen their impact on the natural environment, organizations must design and implement environmentally sustainable processes, which we call the challenge of Green Business Process Management (Green BPM). This chapter elaborates on the challenge and perspec-tive of Green BPM, and explores the contributions that business process management can provide to creating environmentally sustainable organizations. Our key premise is that business as well as information technology managers need to engage in a process-focused discussion to enable a common, comprehensive understanding of organizational processes, and the process-centered opportunities for making these processes, and ultimately the organization as a process-centric entity, “green.” Through our review of the key BPM capability areas and how they can be framed in terms of environmental sustainability considerations, we provide an overview and introduction to the subsequent chapters in this book.

What it means to be green : an examination of early stage environmental and sustainability focused firms

This paper examines ‘green’ entrepreneurial nascent and young firms in Australia. Findings of interest in this paper include: • Green entrepreneurs are more likely to be highly educated and have an extended depth of experience within their industry and are more likely to have started a business prior to their current venture. • Green entrepreneurs exhibit increased levels of innovation, with an increased focus on new & high technology, R&D and the development of proprietary technology. • Green entrepreneurs are most likely to be based upon a product rather than a service and have a higher emphasis upon growth when compared with non-green entrepreneurs. • Green entrepreneurial firms tend to have a longer venture creation process and draw financial resources from a larger number of sources and rely more upon equity as a means of financing their venture.

Address on the power and value of the Sunday school system in evangelizing heathen and re-constructing Christian communitys, by an improvement of the religion and morals, the education and literature, and the social, civil and political institutions of every people : and on the Southern enterprise of the American Sunday school union ; delivered in the Lutheran Church, City of Charleston, on Monday evening, March 17, 1834 /

Author's presentation copy.

Ontological evaluation of enterprise systems interoperability using ebXML

Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of these candidate standards already exists. However, despite broad acceptance, a sound theoretical evaluation of these approaches has not yet been provided. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular, the representation model, to provide the basis for such a theoretical evaluation. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this work, we address the question, what are the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems? We find that users will lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specification will have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.

Taking risks in the face of uncertainty:an exploratory analysis of green innovation

The relationship between uncertainty and firms’ risk-taking behaviour has been a focus of investigation since early discussion of the nature of enterprise activity. Here, we focus on how firms’ perceptions of environmental uncertainty and their perceptions of the risks involved impact on their willingness to undertake green innovation. Analysis is based on a cross-sectional survey of UK food companies undertaken in 2008. The results reinforce the relationship between perceived environmental uncertainty and perceived innovation risk and emphasise the importance of macro-uncertainty in shaping firms’ willingness to undertake green innovation. The perceived (market-related) riskiness of innovation also positively influences the probability of innovating, suggesting either a proactive approach to stimulating market disruption or an opportunistic approach to innovation leadership.