Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems – CEMIS 2.0

Traditional Approach

Dealing with environmental issues in the management level of companies is a relatively new thought that came up within the late eighties. With the upcoming idea on sustainability, viewing ecological, social, and economic issues on the same level, international politics increasingly challenged companies to internalize their impacts on the environment. Furthermore, the development of voluntary eco-management systems like EMAS or ISO 14001 was another fact that shifted the focus more towards companies. Overall, the increasing amount of considerations companies had to put towards environmental issues was initiated externally.

In order to comply with environmental goals, Environmental Management Information Systems (CEMIS), as a special instance of information systems (IS) have been developed. Being introduced mainly to fulfill different external claims, the situation nowadays is the existence of a large number of very specific, heterogeneous solutions in parallel, targeted towards different kind of environmental issues. As such, no true integrative approach exists and even the support of larger-scale problems by CEMIS remains almost exclusively on an operational level.