Abstract

Sustainability and business process management (BPM) are both on today’s IS research agenda. BPM on the one hand is even seen as one of the core aspects of the discipline. Sustainability on the other hand is a practical problem for business managers around the globe. In this paper we investigate if and how aspects of this trend towards more sustainable enterprises have been adopted and incorporated into current BPM research. We do so in form of a structured literature review. This liter-ature review should help to discuss if today’s BPM research provides the right tools and methods to green the underlying business activities or if it is rather embracing sustainability only on a descriptive/argumentative level without true incorpora-tion into its methodological foundations. Based on the literature review the paper closes with some ideas for a future research agenda at the intersection of BPM and sustainability.

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Sustainability in Business Process Management Research – a Literature Review

Sustainability and business process management (BPM) are both on today’s IS research agenda. BPM on the one hand is even seen as one of the core aspects of the discipline. Sustainability on the other hand is a practical problem for business managers around the globe. In this paper we investigate if and how aspects of this trend towards more sustainable enterprises have been adopted and incorporated into current BPM research. We do so in form of a structured literature review. This liter-ature review should help to discuss if today’s BPM research provides the right tools and methods to green the underlying business activities or if it is rather embracing sustainability only on a descriptive/argumentative level without true incorpora-tion into its methodological foundations. Based on the literature review the paper closes with some ideas for a future research agenda at the intersection of BPM and sustainability.