Towards Green BPM - Sustainability and resource efficiency through business process management

Abstract

The sustainability of organizations' business activities is gaining increasing importance. Taking the debate on global warming seriously into account, organizations put more effort in improving their sustainability. One central aspect in the debate on global warming is the energy efficiency of information technology (IT) infrastructures. As the energy consumption based on IT has dramatically increased with the development of the Internet in recent years, IT is considered as a part of the problem. IT can however be part of the solution. In order to improve the efficiency and sustainability of information processing, the concept of Green IT offers a set of possible approaches. In our contribution we argue that applying approaches from the field of Business Process Management (BPM) can support Green IT initiatives and thus the sustainability and resource efficiency of IT-supported business activities in general. The application of BPM approaches in the Green IT context requires new methods and techniques which are named Green BPM in this paper. However, the discussion on sustainability through Green BPM is still in its early stages and only rudimentary techniques exist so far. Our contribution aims at illuminating and discussing opportunities and challenges of Green BPM based on conceptual considerations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.