Sustainability management and its software support in selected Italian enterprises

Sustainability is a very important factor in long-term entrepreneurial success. Company-wide sustainability management is mandatory and requires software support if it is to be conducted efficiently. This paper aims to investigate the approaches and instruments that selected Italian enterprises have implemented for company-wide sustainability management. We conducted a multiple-case study of 30 selected companies. The results show that the selection and deployment of sustainability instruments differ from enterprise to enterprise. However, all of the enterprises studied exhibited substantial uncertainty about the extent of possible future governmental regulations that would necessitate adaptations to existing systems, causing high costs and requiring large resource deployments. This is why software support of sustainability instruments is often managed using Excel-based solutions. The absence of governmental regulations is clearly constraining the technological development and enhancement of enterprise-wide software support for sustainability management instruments.