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Many businesses are adopting sustainable reporting systems for improving communications with internal and external stakeholders, and enhancing reputations by presenting their commitments, activities and performances on sustainability indicators. Sustainability reporting is much more than just producing a report. It is an approach to deliver improvements towards an organisation’s economic, environmental and social performance. The strategic objectives and business processes have to be aligned with the sustainability criteria proposed by various government and non-government agencies. Numerous frameworks have been developed for sustainability reporting but they are not exhaustively backed by tools and technologies. On the other hand, many frameworks and systems have been developed and implemented for modelling various dimensions of sustainability but they are neither comprehensive nor integrated.
This research is aimed at developing sustainability models, modelling and reporting processes and systems that is encapsulated within a framework. The framework facilitates developing models and use of the models by the modelling and reporting processes for sustainability modelling and reporting (SMR). The SMR framework also supports modelling of business processes, information modelling, scenario based decision systems modelling, simulation modelling and modelling of dynamic behaviour and relationships of the sustainability dimensions of businesses. The modelling process and systems will help capturing sustainable business strategies and transforming the existing business processes to sustainable business processes based on the newly developed strategies. The reporting process and systems will help generating sustainability reports of business using sustainability indicators and critical success factors. The framework supports analysis of sustainability indicators to find out the hidden key performance indicators and critical success factors for each sustainability dimension. The SMR framework and architecture is modular, versatile, and extensible and is being implemented by leveraging systems dynamics, balance scorecard, object-orientation and componentisation concepts.

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: Framework for Sustainability Modelling and Reporting, A

20 years working experience on engineering design, implementation monitoring, management consultancy, systems analysis, design, development and implementation. Extensive research on framework and architecture of decision support systems, software project management, sustainability modelling, triple bottom line reporting, and systems development. Actively participated in planning and management of a number of engineering and social development projects that are funded and implemented by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, EEC, OPEC, etc. Currently teaching at Manukau Institute of Technology and researching with the University of Auckland on developing a framework for sustainability and modelling that integrates business with information systems and supports sustainable strategy development and align business process with sustainability strategies.

David Sundaram is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Business School, The University of Auckland. He has a varied academic (B.E. in Electronics & Communications, PG Dip in Industrial Engineering, and Ph.D. in Information Systems) as well as work (systems analysis and design, consulting, teaching, and research) background. His primary research interests include the 1) Design and Implementation of flexible and evolvable Information, Decision, and Knowledge Systems 2) Process, Information, and Decision Modelling 3) Triple Bottom Line Modelling and Reporting 4) Enterprise Application Integration with a focus on ERP-DSS integration.