Organisational impacts on the environment have been a primary topic of
discussion for several decades, prompting a need for organisations to eva-
luate and manage their environmental impacts. Environmental management
systems have since been adopted by companies worldwide for numerous
reasons and benefits. In more recent years, IT solutions have been designed
to meet the various needs of environmental management but with little at-
tention drawn to a standardised approach.
The following thesis aims to determine the use of IT adopted by organisa-
tions to support their environmental management systems (EMSs). In doing
so, the importance of EMSs, IT solutions to support EMSs and the benefits
of IT for such systems are addressed. A small number of informative inter-
views were conducted with EMS consultants and numerous representatives
of ISO 14001 certified companies to establish what IT solutions are availa-
ble to support EMSs and identify the differences between such solutions.
This thesis demonstrates that IT solutions adopted by organisations to sup-
port their EMSs differ in complexity and depend upon the expected results
of the EMS itself. Depending on how integral the EMS is to the organisa-
tion’s business processes, IT can benefit the EMS and ultimately the organi-
sation in a number of ways. In conclusion, EMSs can be implemented with
little technical aid. However, IT is a communicative tool adopted to review,
manage and monitor environmental data and enables easier handling of en-
vironmental data enhancing the performance of the EMS.
2010. , p. 69
Environmental Management Systems, EMS implementation, Information Systems, Information Technology, ISO 14001, Benefits