A Process Model for Green Information System Innovation

Abstract

For many organisations, information system innovation for environmental sustainability is a new venture. While the innovation process has been widely discussed by Information Systems (IS) researchers, less is understood about the unique challenges presented when innovating information systems for environmental sustainability. This paper adopts a process perspective to investigate Green information system innovations and the factors and forces that affect the process of innovation. This study reports two qualitative and interpretive case studies in a large telecommunications company, namely, a Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) system and a Sustainable Knowledge Management and Sharing (SKMS) system. The findings indicate that Green information system innovation follows distinct innovation phases and stages through complex and dynamic interactions among the key people that champion and shape the organisation’s quest towards environmental sustainability. The paper provides a Green information system in practice innovation model and a set of four theoretical propositions.