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A Framework for Sustainability Modelling and Reporting

By M. Daud Ahmed and David Sundaram.

Published by The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability

Sustainability is an approach to a new way of managing business activities that delivers balanced and integrated outcomes of social, economic and environmental performances of businesses. A sustainable business model is a roadmap for achieving sustainability and deals with the issues and dynamic relationships of sustainability dimensions of the businesses. A decision-making system that purports to support managing a sustainability approach should facilitate development of sustainable business strategies, and translation of existing business processes into sustainable business operations. The system should also enable capturing and managing sustainability related data for supporting the strategy development processes, business process reengineering processes and sustainability reporting processes. To achieve this goal we need a sustainable modelling and reporting framework that encapsulates different modelling processes e.g. scenario based decision support, systems dynamics, simulation, business process, data, and information modelling processes. Many frameworks and systems have been developed and implemented for modelling and reporting various dimensions of sustainability but these modelling and reporting frameworks are neither integrated nor exhaustively backed by tools and technologies to support the sustainable business requirements; they also do not support the complete life cycle of a business transformation process. Therefore, businesses are facing increasing difficulty in developing, integrating and applying sustainable strategies and operations into their core business systems. This paper proposes a generic domain independent sustainability modelling and reporting (SMR) framework that integrates various modelling processes for developing sustainable business models and sustainability reports. The framework encapsulates sustainability models, modelling and reporting processes and aligns with the sustainable business framework. The SMR framework and associated architecture is modular, versatile, and extensible that leverages systems thinking, object-orientation and componentization concepts.

The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, Volume 3, Issue 2, pp.29-40. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 837.278KB).

Dr. M. Daud Ahmed

Senior Lecturer, Department of Computing and Information Technology, Manukau Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Dr. David Sundaram

Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand