Sustainability Patterns for the Improvement of IT-Related Business Processes with Regard to Ecological Goals

The transformation of proven methods and knowledge to reusable artifacts in the form of patterns or anti-patterns is very common in many areas of IS research, for instance in Business Process Management (BPM). An area that lacks in support on the basis of patterns is the area of Green Business Process Management. With this paper, we introduce the concept of sustainability patterns in BPM that can be used for the improvement of existing processes or for the design of new processes in due consideration of ecological goals such as the reduction of resource consumption during the executing of these processes. We further present the results of a qualitative analysis that we conducted to extract a total number of 26 Ecological Process Patterns from real-world processes and a catalog with generic process weakness patterns. The identified patterns indicate a latent potential for process enhancement once the patterns are applied to real-world processes.