Environmental Sustainability through Green Business Process Management

Abstract

The climate change phenomenon, directly or indirectly, affects industries and nations. Governments and organizations have been challenged to identify their environmental impacts to address environmental sustainability issues. A promising, yet under-studied in this context, theme of information systems (IS) literature that has the potential to help with identifying, quantifying and managing environmental impacts is business process management (BPM). With its focus on continual process performance improvement, the capacity of BPM to contribute to Environmental Sustainability (ES) needs to be further explored. Yet, contributions from the BPM research community and the impact of these contributions appear to be fragmented. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review to explore BPM contributions to ES, with a focus on environmental performance indicators (EPIs) as well as relevant organizational factors related to ES and BPM. In doing so, we identify and explore ‘Green BPM’ contributions and suggest ways to advance BPM research in the context of ES.