An exploratory study into the use and value of environmental enterprise systems

Environmental enterprise systems (EES) are an emerging type of integrated enterprise-grade software developed for environmental sustainability. This paper reports an exploratory investigation into the use and value of EES based on case studies of an EES vendor, four organisations that have adopted EES and an organisation that has yet to adopt EES in Australia. The findings indicate that EES offers unique functionalities that the case organisations are using to automate environmental data collection and the business process of sensing and responding abnormal building energy consumptions; easily inform staff, senior managers and other stakeholders about their environmental sustainability targets and performance and transform risk, incident and building energy management processes. This is enabling the cases to improve their environmental data quality, generate different reports with ease and low costs and reduce their risks. In addition, some of the cases are using EES to create EES-enabled distinctive capabilities such as energy optimisation, risk management and analytics innovations which are contributing to achieving environmental strategic value. Based on the findings, this paper highlights three potential pathways for harvesting environmental value from EES.