The Role of Information Systems in Green Transformations

The deterioration of the natural environment is a preeminent issue for our society, and business organizations are a main contributor to this challenge. In responding to increased social, cultural, and also legislative pressures that expand the responsibility of firms to increase attention to environmental concerns, chief executives have increasingly committed to “Green IT” initiatives and similar sustainability transformation efforts. These initiatives build on information systems (IS) as a key resource to assist organizations in transforming to more sustainable entities, notably because information systems have been argued to be the greatest force for productivity improvement in the last half century. This talk explores important functional affordances (i.e., action possibilities) originating in information systems, which are required in environmental sustainability transformations as they create an actionable context in which (a) organizations can engage in a sensemaking process related to understanding emerging environmental requirements, and (b) individuals can implement environmentally sustainable work practices. Implications are discussed relating to (1) how information systems can contribute to creating environmentally sustainable organizations, (2) the design of information systems to create required functional affordances, (3) the management of sustainability transformations, and (4) the further development of the concept of functional affordances in IS research.

About Dr. Stefan Seidel

Stefan Seidel is an assistant professor of Information Systems and Business Process Management at the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Liechtenstein. Stefan’s main research interest is in how information systems (IS)—and the academic IS discipline—can contribute to better organizational practice and, ultimately, improved social welfare. To this end, most of his current research is in the areas of IS-enabled organizational and societal transformation, organizational creativity and innovation, and green IS. Stefan’s work has appeared in major journals, including MIS Quarterly, the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and the Journal of Information Technology. Stefan is co-editor and co-author of the book Green Business Process Management—Towards the Sustainable Enterprise and is Chair Elect of the AIS Special Interest Group on Green Information Systems (SIGGreen).