Towards Sustainable Digital Transformation

• Published in: 2020 IEEE 22nd Conference on Business Informatics (CBI) Vol. 1; pp. 104 - 113
• Main Authors: Gils, Bas van, Weigand, Hans
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2020
• Subjects: Air pollution; Biological system modeling; Economics; Green products; Organizations; Sustainable development
• ISSN: 2378-1971
• DOI: 10.1109/CBI49978.2020.00019

Digital transformation is the form that IT development is taking nowadays that goes beyond digitizing information processing but includes a transformation of the organization, for instance new digital services or new business models. Digital transformation projects are therefore in a unique position to realize the sustainable development agenda.Sustainability is a major social concern of our times and has been addressed extensively in the IS literature. Current discussions on sustainability are mainly following the United Nations report, focusing on goals around energy consumption, carbon footprint reduction and the like. We believe that a broad discussion on two fronts is needed: (1) ensuring that the development and use of information systems is in line with sustainability objectives, and (2) ensuring that th organization doesn't falls back to the old 'steady state' after transformation initiatives are completed. The first contribution of this paper is a holistic definition of sustainable digital transformation, based on an literature research. The second contribution is the development of a fractal sustainable object model and an exploration into the impact of this model on enterprise modeling in two small cases. The first case is about environmental accounting, the second on the enterprise engineering method. We consider this paper to be a first in a series. The focus is on developing the overall framework with some 'light weight' validation. A full verification and implementation is left for future research.