An environmental digital service as a tool for environmental sustainability

Abstract

The ever-depleting state of the environment is putting more and more pressure on nations and companies to find better ways to operate. Thus, there is an increasing need for finding and innovating solutions that support environmental sustainability and sustainability at large. Specially manufacturing companies need to adapt their operations to be more environmentally friendly. Monitoring environmental impacts has been deemed an essential tool for environmental sustainability and digital technologies are the ones that enable this monitoring. Thus, there is recognized a connection between the benefits of utilization of digital technologies and environmental benefits. In addition, services are recognized as a tool that can help with bringing performance benefits for businesses from digitalization and having potential to also help with environmental issues. Digitalization can also help with realizing the benefits from services. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine, could the combination of these three elements, an environmental digital service, work as a tool for companies to tackle environmental sustainability issues and what it could look like and need to work. This study was conducted through a case study in the target company and examines an environmental dashboard service as an example of a service that utilizes digital technologies to monitor the environmental impacts of a company and through that aims to help them with environmental sustainability issues. The goal was to find out what elements this kind of dashboard should have to be able to offer the best benefits for a company and for the environment, and what would be needed for it to work as a service. The data for this study was collected through semi structured interviews with the target company’s internal personnel and their customers. The literature section of this study examined more broadly the connection between sustainability and an environmental digital service. The literature and empirical findings show that digital services have potential to help with environmental sustainability and advance sustainability as well. They show that an environmental dashboard that monitors environmental impacts and offers data in a useful form is seen as a useful tool. Its benefits can also be connected to economic sustainability, the changing of culture to be more sustainability-oriented and supporting sustainable innovation. However, when creating a service like this it’s important to carefully examine and research the target customers so that a required level of understanding of a customer is ensured for this type of solution to work. When it comes to the dashboard contents, it would be important to monitor as many environmental KPIs as possible for the best environmental outcomes. It was also deemed important that the dashboard has features that support predictability and the processing of the collected data so that it supports decision making efficiently. However, even though there is potential in an environmental digital service, it’s important to remember that being sustainable requires more than just addressing environmental issues, Thus, addressing how this type of solution is connected to sustainability at large should be remembered. This study adds to existing literature by supporting the notion that digital technologies have a lot of potential to help with environmental issues and that services can be a good tool in helping make environmental digital solutions work. It gives an example of an environmental digital solution that practice sees as useful and adds to the research of potentially profitable environmental solutions and sustainable services. Future research should examine deeper how an environmental digital service should be organized and how an environmental digital service supports sustainability at large.