Quality of IT support for corporate environmental management: A paradigmatic framework

Organisations face increasing pressures to deploy appropriate environmental sustainability practices and reduce their ecological impacts. The use of information technologies (IT) offer much potential for supporting such practices, through data processing and reporting mechanisms, as well as being a platform for business redesign. This theoretical paper argues that in order to evaluate the quality of IT support in this area, critical consideration should be given to the 'environmental paradigm' that is serving as the basis of evaluation i.e. the underlying assumptions/model of what constitutes environmental sustainability in the modern enterprise. Drawing from a synthesis of relevant literature, this paper presents a framework that distinguishes three environmental paradigms, and the salient criteria that they suggest as the basis for assessing the quality of IT support in this arena. The criteria seen to be important are: eco-efficiency, eco-efficacy and eco-effectiveness.