Towards Green Business Process Management: Concept and Implementation of an Artifact to Reduce the Energy Consumption of Business Processes

The consideration of ecological objectives has been identified as one of the major topics for IS research and Business Process Management (BPM). An essential precondition for advancing the emerging discipline of Green BPM still is the availability of methods and tools for detecting and matching the resource usage of a business process to its individual steps. In this paper, a conceptual integration model for the energy consumption of IT components and business processes is developed for the specific setting of administrative business processes. The integration concept is implemented as a software prototype, following a design-science approach. Its application is demonstrated in a sample scenario. Findings show, that the integration concept and the software prototype increase the transparency of the energy consumption of administrative business processes, and enable users to save energy. Furthermore, the prototype can be used to develop and validate effective methods for creating energy-efficient business processes.