Abstract
This chapter aims to apply the intelligence used in businesses decision making to an organization’s environmental management strategy so as to support its green credentials. While the World Wide Web (WWW or Web for short) has had an impact on every aspect of human life, its current and upcoming versions, dubbed Web 2.0 and beyond, need to be considered in the context of environmental management. The use of decision making technologies and processes in this area of an organization is what we call “environmental intelligence” (EI). This EI can be used by businesses in order to discharge one of their significant corporate responsibilities–that of managing their activities that affect the environment including waste reduction, green house gas reduction, recycling, minimizing unnecessary human and material movements, and so on. Furthermore, the use of EI, it is envisaged, will also help organizations create local and industrial benchmarks, standards, audits, and grading that will help a large cross section of businesses to comply with the environmental requirements. The architecture of such enterprise intelligent systems needs to incorporate technologies like executable services, blogs, and wikis in addition to the standard communication and execution requirements of the Web. This chapter describes the literature review and the initial output of the research being carried out by the authors which, we hope, will eventually result in an environmentally intelligent Web-based business strategic system (EIWBSS).
TopWeb 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users (Sen, 2008). Essentially, Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for a group of technologies that have advanced web usage and turned the web into a development platform for the enterprise. Specifically, these technologies include: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM feeds, Web services, JavaScript and AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Folksonomies, Mashups, Programming Frameworks, Blogs, Wikis, and so on (Ferquson, 2007). Java Script and AJAX can be used to add user interfaces to web based tools that can be used by clients. Thus, these scripts can enrich the corporate reports by making them interactive (O’Reilly, 2005). The sites may also have social-networking aspects (O’Reilly, 2006 ; Lee, 2006). A significant chunk of Web 2.0 technologies are primarily made up of service offerings over the Internet those are also executable. The use of these technologies in an information systems architecture results in service oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA is a style of organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities of software services that may be offered by different organizations through their software systems (Schmidt, 2008).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cloud Computing: It is a style of computing, in which dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a service over an internet.
Mobile Environmental Intelligence: An intelligence adopted by businesses to record, collate, monitor and optimize their environmental performance through automation and convergence.
Green Transactions: A transaction of data and information in business activities where movement of men and machine is minimal along with the reduced use of paper.
Carbon Footprint: The total amount of greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by a business activity or by an individual.
Environmentally Intelligent Web based Business Strategic System (EIWBSS): EIWBSS enables the organizations to judiciously use the web services / Web 2.0 technologies in creating and modifying their business processes, utilizing their information silos by connecting them, and providing real time reporting features to decision makers – all with the specific goal of achieving environmental responsibilities
Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy: It is a business approach that incorporates environmental factors in it.
Environmental Intelligence (EI): Environmental Intelligence can be understood as the use of business tools and technologies to understand and coordinate a response to the environmental challenge.
Mobile Business Architecture: An architecture which emphasizes the data web to be arranged as set of structured data records which can be published to the mobile web in reusable and remotely query able formats