Abstract
An organization’s future increasingly depends on its environmental sustainability, so it is vital to equip present business architecture with a framework for environmental compliance. A business needs to understand the Green policies, processes that create waste and emissions, enablement of efficient use of resources, metrics for monitoring the greening of the organization and implementation of environmental strategies. This chapter will provide a review of environmental challenges and understanding of the contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in environmental strategies of a business and its sustainable management. A consolidated, systematic approach to the redesign of a business enterprise and to forming an Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy (ERBS) is presented. The methodology includes five activities: Need for reengineering the business architecture, Map and investigate the processes, Design ERBS, Implement reengineered process and employ ERBS and improve continuously to monetize emissions.
TopNeed For Reengineering The Business Architecture
Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed (Hammer & Champy, 1993). As highlighted by Unhelkar and Dickens (2008) that the rapidly growing importance of environmental issues requires business enterprises to take immediate responsibilities for “Green” initiatives because business enterprises have greater resource available to them, as compared to rest of the society. Furthermore, their activities have greater impact on the environment (Unhelkar & Dickens, 2008).
There is a need to reengineer the business operations, process and services according to the environmental parameters because with the increasing recognition that man made CO2 emissions are a major contributing factors to global warming (Murugesan, 2008). Enterprise, government and society at large now have an important new agenda: tackling environmental issues and adopting environmentally sound practices.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy (ERBS): is a business approach that incorporates environmental factors in it.
Green Policies: provides environmental parameters to reduce the environment impact of business operations and promote sustainable development to the organization
Environmental Intelligence (EI): is an intelligent use of business tools and technologies which can lead an enterprise to a green enterprise.
Green Business Architecture: A four layered architecture deals with keeping organization’s environmental footprint small, reducing waste, measuring, monitoring, mitigating and monetizing the carbon emissions.
Environmental Management System (EMS): is a management tool enabling an organization of any size or type to identify and control the environmental impact of its activities, products or services, to improve its environmental performance continually, and to implement a systematic approach to setting environmental objectives and targets, to achieving these and to demonstrating that they have been achieved.
Green Web Services: are the web services endeavors to play a significant role for measuring the carbon footprints of a business and thus help the enterprise to take effective action to shrink the carbon footprints
Green ICT: is the study and practice of using computing (ICT) resources efficiently.