Sustainability data integration; A prototypical implementation of a light-weight information system component

Abstract

The environment matters. At least this is the minimum denominator the members of the World Climate Conference have been finally agreeing upon. Unfortunately a successor of the Kyoto Protocol has not yet been ratified. Induced by recent natural catastrophes an increasing public awareness of sustainability concerns became more visible. In order to fulfil the growing customers demand for greener products companies have to act and adopt new technology to fill this information gap. The information technology adoption rate has been visibly increasing during the last decade. The product and service lifecycle however is still narrowly focused on classical product or service attributes such as price, quality and availability. Hardly any of the current information systems for the midsize segment integrates environmental data. Within the frame of this paper a “business trip use case” is taken as an example to show how sustainability data can be integrated into the classical procurement process by using a light-weight and Open Source based Portlet platform technology. The example has been conducted as part of the research within the frame of the EU-project “Solution and Services Engineering for Measuring, Monitoring, and Management of Organizations’ Environmental Performance Indicators” (OEPI).