Designing Sustainable Information Systems

Recognizing that information systems (IS) can have an effect on the envi-ronment, research concerned with the design and development of innovative organizational and technical artifacts has started to focus on the development of ‘sustainable IS’. Much of this work implicitly assumes a focus on the nat-ural environment – our planet. In this paper we propose a broader and more inclusive view of ‘environmental sustainability’ and develop a theory of en-vironmentally sustainable IS development that embodies not only the plane-tary environment but also environments such as that of the organizational setting in which an IS operates. Our design theory offers four new design principles for the development of information systems that support conser-vation, restoration and resilience as sustainability fit functions. We embed these principles into a procedural model of IS development that offers pre-scription in three core stages for design and action