Green BPM as a business-oriented discipline : a systematic mapping study and research agenda

Green Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on the ecological impact of business processes. This article provides a systematic mapping study of Green BPM literature to evaluate five attributes of the Green BPM research area: (1) scope, (2) disciplines, (3) accountability, (4) researchers and (5) quality control. The results allow developing a research agenda to enhance Green BPM as an approach for environmentally sustainable organizations. We rely on a dichotomy of knowledge production to present research directives relevant for both academics and practitioners in order to help close a rigor-relevance gap. The involvement of both communities is crucial for Green BPM to advance as an applied, business-oriented discipline

Business Process Management: Saving the Planet?

Organisational and government concerns about environmental sustainability (ES) are on the increase. While a significant amount of research from a wide range of domains has addressed various ES challenges, intuitively, Business Process Management (BPM), with its focus on process improvement and process performance measurement, has much to offer the ES field. In this paper we aim to understand the BPM research contribution to ES, including specific Environmental Performance Indicators (EPI), and the BPM concepts that have been utilized in the ES context. To this end we conduct a systematic literature review to capture prior research focused on BPM and ES, coding the articles according to their contribution to EPIs and other ES concepts, while also contrasting their focus with main challenges identified in industry reports. Our study identifies which EPIs have been addressed in prior BPM research and highlights areas of future contribution

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Business process management to date has not explicitly focused on sustainability as a change objective or driver. Although, approaches relating BPM and Sustainability already exist, e.g. Green BPM is the sum of all management activities that help to monitor and reduce the environmental impact of business processes in their design, improvement, implementation, or operation stages, as well as lead to cultural change within the process lifecycle. The intention behind Green BPM is the incorporation of environmental objectives into the management of business processes. To achieve this objective, BPM has to be extended by ecologically oriented complements, as are the consideration of environmental strategy as a part of the process strategy, or the awareness for energy consumption and pollution. Together with an earlier article consolidates several contributions of the BPM foundations in three underlying process change traditions: (1) the Quality Control tradition, (2) the Business Management tradition, and (3) the Information Systems (IS) tradition. These three traditions propose different approaches to business process change and each emphasizes some practices over others. Currently, there is a tendency of combining the various traditions in a comprehensive BPM approach