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.