Engineering the Sustainable Business: An Enterprise Architecture Approach

Abstract

Sustainability has always been an essential issue for the profitable business. Nowadays however, environmental responsibility is fast becoming just as important as economic viability as climate change theories turn into a grim reality and relevant regulations are expected to tighten significantly in the near future. Businesses typically react to this challenge by implementing environmental reporting and management systems; however; often the company does not reap the full benefits from such initiatives, mostly because the environmental approach is not integrated in the overall strategy and management is not supported by appropriately aggregated and available environmental information. This chapter argues for the necessity and benefit of integrating the proposed environmental management (EM) project into the ongoing 'extended' enterprise architecture (EA) initiative present in all successful companies. This is done by demonstrating how a reference architecture framework and a meta-methodology using EA artifacts can be used to co-design the EM system, the organisation and its information system in order to achieve a much needed synergy between the business and environmental strategic management