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Concerns about the balance between economic growth, social wellbeing and the use of natural resources emerged as early as the 18th century (For example Von Carlowitz, 1713 and Malthus, 1798). Today, humanity uses the equivalent of 1.75 Earths to provide the resources it uses and the waste it produces (Global Footprint Network, 2020), and the concerns about humanity’s ecological overshoot may have never been more eminent. And as senior business professionals acknowledge that “business will need to play the leading role in advancing sustainability in the future” (BSR/GlobeScan, 2017), these concerns are also affecting companies and organizations. The responsibility these organizations assume for their societal impacts and sustainable development, leads to changes in the products, services, processes, policies and resources of these organizations (Tulder et al., 2014). Given the functional ability of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) to improve, change and reinvent business processes, IT/IS is also considered to be an important contributor to more sustainable business practices (Kazlauskas and Hasan, 2009).
It is increasingly being recognized that projects, and therefore also IT/IS projects, play an instrumental role in the transition of organizations and society towards a more sustainable state (Marcelino-Sádaba et al., 2015). This relationship between sustainability and project management is being addressed in a growing number of studies and publications (Silvius and Schipper, 2014; Aarseth et al., 2017), and sustainable project management is considered one of the most important global project management trends today (Alvarez-Dionisi et al., 2016). However, research on sustainability and project management focuses more on the impact that construction and engineering projects have on the environment than on the contribution that IT/IS projects can make to the sustainability of the organization (Marnewick, 2015).
The relationship between the goals and ambitions of an organization with regards to sustainability, the required changes of business models, processes and resources (Tulder et al., 2014), the enabling role of IT/IS in these changes (Boudreau et al., 2008), and IT/IS projects (Marnewick, 2015), should logically be on the agenda of senior IT/IS management professionals, in their role as initiators or ‘owners’ of IT/IS related projects. However, Watson et al. (2010) conclude that “the IS community seems largely ignorant of the challenge of sustainable development”.
A recent study (Marnewick et al. 2019) show that the majority of project managers is “intrinsically motivated” for the consideration of sustainability in their projects. However, in addressing sustainability, project managers have to take into account the interests of a variety of stakeholders, with one of the most influential ones being the project owner/sponsor (Silvius et al., 2012). The project owner is the one that commissions the project, sets the project objectives and the goals and is “ultimately answerable for how the project is managed, for the success or failure of the product of the project and the realization of benefits” (GAPPS, 2017:7). These project objectives and goals should logically be aligned with the sustainability ambitions and strategy of the organization. However, also project owners need to balance different interests and limitations. And the earlier mentioned conclusion of Watson et al. (2010) suggests that sustainability considerations are not high on the agenda of project owners of IT/IS projects. A variety of factors may therefore influence the actual behavior of the project owner.