Towards an Environmental Management Approach for Collaborative Networks

Abstract

Environmental responsibility is evolving into a crucial aspect of strategic management as regulations are expected to tighten significantly in the near future following the need to mitigate the effects of climate change. Many businesses react to this challenge by implementing environmental reporting and management systems. However, often the environmental programme is not properly integrated in the overall business strategy and the management does not have timely access to appropriate environmental information. Moreover, within collaborative networks (CNs) the environmental management (EM) effort should be coordinated amid partners to achieve a much needed synergy and also enable prompt deployment of the required EM artefacts within the virtual organisations (VOs) created. This paper attempts to show a possible way to integrate environmental management (EM) into the VOs set up by the CN participants by using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) life cycle-based approach.