Information Systems and Stakeholder engagement - First Results from Content Analysis

True and long-lasting stakeholder relationships have been identified as precondition for long-term success of companies. Thus, companies put a lot of effort into communication with stakeholders and stakeholder engagement. Consequently, the possibilities to communicate with stakeholders to involve them in environmental, social and economic projects of companies has been widely discussed. However, the various stakeholders (internal and external, primary and secondary) influence companies in different ways. Information systems support the stakeholder engagement and allow specific communication in accordance with various stakeholders needs’, but to date a clear picture on their application is missing. Our work investigates this gap and serves as a starting point for better understanding on how information systems support stakeholder engagement. We select CSR reports from a reporting database and analyse them in terms of information systems involved in the stakeholder engagement process. Based on this we will develop a “landscape” of information systems support for stakeholder engagement. First results presented in this work-in-progress paper are based on a limited number of reports suggest that information systems mainly support communication with external stakeholders, whereas direct face-to-face communication predominates internal stakeholder engagement. Overall, information technology (such as the Internet) prevails compared to application of specific information systems.