Towards Inter-Organizational Environmental Information Systems for Sustainable Business Networks

Value creation that incorporates Environmental Performance Indicators (EPIs) requires collaboration among different supply chain entities. This especially holds for product-level indicators, since the required resources are scattered along thewhole supply chain. Prevailing environmental information systems (EIS) do not support flexible collaboration among involved supply chain partners. The paper at hand provides a contribution in this area by proposing an innovative architecture artifact for inter-organizational EIS (IO-EIS). The architecture was developed by following the design science approach: The requirements on IO-EIS were extracted together with industry representatives based on three use cases. Anin-depth and systematic literature research was applied to identify published critical success factors for networked information systems. The proposed architecture artifact was designed based on the findings of the two analysis steps.