| dc.description.abstract | It is common for organisations to engage in a lifelong continuous improvement cycle centred around reducing negative externalities and increasing positive ones. As a result, organisation have a central role when it comes to our concerns about how the concept of sustainability is both threatened and communicated. Additionally, the biggest challenge for most organisations remain in how unsustainable behaviour can be alleviated and how associated improvement areas and actions can be determined. In this research, we refer to this as Improvement Planning for Ethics, Social and Environmental (IP4ESET); a set of activities, as part of a strategic management process, leading to the determination of actions that are needed to improve social and environmental impact and business ethics. The input for these actions can vary due to different social and environmental accounting methods that exists assessing the social and environmental effects of an organisational actions. This can be regarded as a complication for defining a standard method for IP4ESET. For this reason, the purpose of this research is to provide an overview of the state-of-research and state-of-practice in IP4ESET by conducting a literature study and a case study. To discover which activities are performed, a semi-structured interview is conducted with six responsible enterprises. By using a formal method comparison approach, in which improvement planning methods for ethics, social and environmental topics are compared with each other. As a result, a super method is constructed, which serves as a generic method for IP4ESET. This is complemented by a systematic literature study of both scientific and grey literature.
In practice, we discovered several issues. For instance, closing the gap between translating high level goals into concrete actions. Some organisations have very mature processes and completed an improvement plan many times, while others start their first improvement planning phase. However, there is no step-by-step guide indicating how and where to start, which activities are relevant and to evolve over the years. A variability model could provide such a guide and framework. This model is created by applying process variants in the activities of the generic method for IP4ESET. By including variants to a generic process, a variable business process emerged. Here, possibilities are offered for tailoring the process to the desires and standards of different organisations. Accordingly, this research intends to investigate the possibilities of developing a versatile and model driven tool that supports the IP4ESET phase. We found that several tools have been introduced. Despite, no versatile tool can be found in both literature and practice solely focusing on IP4ESET. It becomes clear that such a tool is highly desirable in practice in order to manage data and to create a social, environmental and business ethics improvement plan. Therefore, we have created a concept version of a versatile and model-driven tool visualising the results of the activities as part of the variability model. This concept version is validated by means of a Technical Action Research, which revealed both weaknesses and strengths, while suggesting potential improvements. As a result, this research lays the groundwork for a mature ICT-support tool for IP4ESET in the future. | |
