ICT-based Corporate Communication and Sustainability Reporting

14th Workshop of the Expert Group on Corporate Environmental Information Systems (Fachgruppe Betriebliche Umweltinformationssysteme, FG BUIS)

Sustainability reporting describes a development path towards a concept of balanced corporate reporting, usually communicating the three pillars of environmental, social, and economic performance and its mutual interrelations, what in business terms is called the triple bottom line approach or announced under the banner of CSR. While the early communication vehicles – the majority with an environmental focus – have been available on print media, today most have broadened their scope and are accessible on the WWW as HTML files. Standalone environmental focus, print media fixation, and layout oriented data formats, however, do not seem to be sufficient any longer, especially in terms content-syndication, harmonization, efficiencies, future ICT requirements, stakeholders’ expectations, and data exchange, be it inside and outside the companies.

Recent progress in ICT applications enables an array of unique capabilities to be employed for improving the communication of companies’ overall performance. They especially help to better integrate CSR issues into daily business, industrial environments, market communication, and various stakeholder relations. For example, information management can be improved in various ways: data relevant for performance in terms of sustainability is captured from different data sources, combined despite different data formats, analysed for decision making, professionally mastered and hypermedia-featured, customised according to specific information needs and certain guidelines, distributed and presented, e.g. via email, cross media, fax, or ordinary mail.

Focus and Scope
The goal of this workshop is to investigate and describe (i) how ICT could support sustainability issues – be it environmental-itensive or risk-driven – at firms’ level, and (ii) how ICT-based applications could be linked sucessfully with other methods, instruments, and tools along corporate (online) communication, finally to advance its use to operational sustainable business and to support managerial decision-making in a proper manner. As the overall aim, the workshop attempts to bridge the gap between the business-driven field of sustainability management and its different facets on the one hand and on the other, the technology-intensive area of ICT applications and environmental information systems.

Subject Coverage
We are looking forward to receiving contributions (best practice, concepts, analyses, solutions) including, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Stakeholder Management and User modeling
- CSR Communication
- Online Relations
- Sustainability Reporting
- Environmental Management Accounting
- Environmental Information Systems
- Web 2.0-Technologies and Social Software
- Software Tools and ICT Applications
- Controlling and Information Management Approaches
- Balanced Scorecard Concepts
- Insights from Business Informatics

Guest chairs and contact
Ralf Isenmann (ralf.isenmann@innovation.uni-bremen.de), Claus Lang-Koetz, Jorge Marx Gómez