Trend to Comprehensive Sustainability Reporting and Proactive Sustainability Management

The pressure on enterprises to manage and improve their environmental sustainability is steadily increasing. Despite the growing awareness in the IS community and business practice, current IS solutions remain in an initial state. Sustainability benchmarking is seen as a novel and effective tool in this context. However, sustainability benchmarking faces two major obstacles: First, the heterogeneity of the data requires significant pre-processing, and, second, the sensitivity of the data causes enterprises to reluctantly share this data. Our contribution is twofold: After analyzing the data input problem and identifying appropriate and available solutions, we present a secure sustainability benchmarking service (SBS) to overcome the information-sharing problem. Our service uses homomorphic encryption to protect the data during processing and differential privacy to protect against leakages from the reports. Finally, we evaluate in detail a prototypical implementation of this secure sustainability benchmarking service and illustrate its applicability in industry.