Systems theory-based abstractions and decision schemes for corporate environmental compliance management

Even though corporate sustainability management has become a major topic of research and of the business world, its digitalization is still in an infancy stage. One of the reasons for this situation is the fact that domain-specific abstractions, which are a major underpinning of digitalization in general, have so far received very little attention. This is particularly a major obstacle for the digitalization of the work area of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM), which is intended to ensure that the firm complies with environmental legislation. Using general system theory, the CECM area is analyzed, and a set of domain-specific abstractions is proposed. Further contributions of the article are focused on two crucial CECM decision tasks: the relevance assessment of environmental regulations and the determination of compliance enforcement measures. Based on the abstractions, decision schemes and tailored domain-specific templates of decision trees for these tasks are suggested and demonstrated through a running example. It is expected that through these novel building blocks, this research contributes to an advancement of the digitalization of CECM processes and of sustainability management in general. For example, the proposed building blocks may serve as a foundation for the development of compliance management information systems that offer smart assistance for CECM tasks. Digital assistance may mitigate deficiencies in CECM expertise and CECM experience, which are often imposed in practice by tight budget constraints.