From green to sustainability: Information Technology and an integrated sustainability framework

Sustainability has increasingly become important to business research and practice over the past decades as a result of rapid depletion of natural resources and concerns over wealth disparity and corporate social responsibility. Within this realm, the so-called triple bottom line seeks to evaluate business performance on its impacts on the environment and interested stakeholders besides profitability concerns. So far, Management Information Systems research on sustainability has been somewhat constrained in the realm of green IT, which focuses mostly on the reduction of energy consumption of corporate IT systems. Using the resource-based view as the theoretical foundation, the manuscript develops an integrated sustainability framework, illustrating the integration of human, supply chain, and IT resources to enable firms develop sustainability capabilities, which help firms deliver sustainable values to relevant stakeholders and gain sustained competitive advantage. Particularly, the role of automate, informate, transform, and infrastructure IT resources are examined in the development of sustainability capabilities. The work calls for a bold new role of IT in sustainability beyond energy consumption reduction. Implications for future research and management practice on IT and sustainability are also discussed.

Research highlights► IT can contribute to sustainability beyond reducing energy consumption of IT systems. ► IT resources can contribute to all three aspects of the triple bottom line (TBL). ► Human, supply chain, and IT resources combined enable firms address the TBL. ► The TBL can be addressed by combining resources. ► Different types of IT resources contribute differently to sustainability capabilities.