IDENTIFYING THE ROLE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN ACHIEVING ENERGY-RELATED ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY USING TEXT MINING

Environmental sustainability is one of the most important topics of our time. Energy consumption is a significant aspect of environmental sustainability, as it is a major source of pollution. In order to determine how information systems can assist organizations in reducing energy consumption, we first identify energy-related activities of organizations by examining the content of 4,999 sustainability reports that communicate corporate activities directed toward sustainability. We use latent semantic analysis (LSA) to extract the most prominent topics discussed in these reports and the concept of affordances in order to portray the potential role of information systems in supporting these activities. We identify five such affordances: (1) balancing supply and demand with consideration of the energy price; (2) capturing, reporting, and sharing energy-related data; (3) reducing energy consumption and emissions; (4) sustainable waste management; and (5) coordination of flexible charging of electric vehicles. These affordances support energy management through information systems in practice and set a foundation for further research in the important field of energy informatics.

[1]  Dobin Yim,et al.  Tale of Two Green Communities: Energy Informatics and Social Competition on Energy Conservation Behavior , 2011, AMCIS.

[2]  Lucian L. Visinescu,et al.  Text-mining the voice of the people , 2012, Commun. ACM.

[3]  Richard T. Watson,et al.  Information Systems and Environmentally Sustainable Development: Energy Informatics and New Directions for the IS Community , 2010, MIS Q..

[4]  Nigel Melville,et al.  Information Systems Innovation for Environmental Sustainability , 2010, MIS Q..

[5]  Peter W. Foltz,et al.  An introduction to latent semantic analysis , 1998 .

[6]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  LSA: First dimension and dimensional weighting , 2003 .

[7]  Thorsten Staake,et al.  Improving residential energy consumption at large using persuasive systems , 2011, ECIS.

[8]  Paul F. Williams,et al.  Sustainability: An Analysis of Organizational Reporting and Implications for ERP systems , 2012 .

[9]  Florian Kerschbaum,et al.  Confidential Information-Sharing for Automated Sustainability Benchmarks , 2011, ICIS.

[10]  Cameron W. Potter,et al.  Building a smarter smart grid through better renewable energy information , 2009, 2009 IEEE/PES Power Systems Conference and Exposition.

[11]  Gerard Salton,et al.  A vector space model for automatic indexing , 1975, CACM.

[12]  Darrell Laham,et al.  From paragraph to graph: Latent semantic analysis for information visualization , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[13]  Saonee Sarker,et al.  Understanding Energy Informatics: A Gestalt-Fit Perspective , 2012, AMCIS.

[14]  Preslav Nakov.  Latent semantic analysis of textual data , 2000, CompSysTech '00.

[15]  H. Kaiser.  The varimax criterion for analytic rotation in factor analysis , 1958 .

[16]  Florian Kerschbaum,et al.  From a Barrier to a Bridge: Data-Privacy in Deregulated Smart Grids , 2012, ICIS.

[17]  Atul K. Jain,et al.  Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate , 2008 .

[18]  Thorsten Staake,et al.  Green IS Design and Energy Conservation: An Empirical Investigation of Social Normative Feedback , 2011, ICIS.

[19]  Jens Vykoukal,et al.  Grid Technology as Green IT Strategy? Empirical Results from the Financial Services Industry , 2010, ECIS.

[20]  Angel A. Bayod-Rújula,et al.  Future development of the electricity systems with distributed generation , 2009 .

[21]  Anjali Ganesh Jivani,et al.  A Comparative Study of Stemming Algorithms , 2011 .

[22]  Matthias Schumann,et al.  Rfid-based individualization of extended producer responsibility and recycling for weee , 2011, ECIS.

[23]  Eva Niesten.  Network investments and the integration of distributed generation: Regulatory recommendations for the Dutch electricity industry , 2010 .

[24]  Paul M. Leonardi,et al.  When Flexible Routines Meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies , 2011, MIS Q..

[25]  Steve Elliot,et al.  Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability: A Resource Base and Framework for IT-Enabled Business Transformation , 2011, MIS Q..

[26]  Sharon A. Johnson,et al.  A Theory of Clinic-EHR Affordance Actualization , 2009 .

[27]  Vanessa A. Cooper,et al.  International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) 2009 IT and Eco-sustainability : Developing and Validating a Green IT Readiness Model , 2017 .

[28]  Richard T. Watson,et al.  Design Of A Demand Response System: Economics And Information Systems Alignment , 2013, ECIS.

[29]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Affordance, conventions, and design , 1999, INTR.

[30]  Susan T. Dumais,et al.  Using Linear Algebra for Intelligent Information Retrieval , 1995, SIAM Rev..

[31]  Dirk Neumann,et al.  Beyond Mobility - An Energy Informatics Business Model For Vehicles In The Electric Age , 2013, ECIS.

[32]  M. Lynne Markus,et al.  A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole's Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[33]  Victor R. Prybutok,et al.  Latent Semantic Analysis: five methodological recommendations , 2012, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[34]  Andreas Hotho,et al.  A Brief Survey of Text Mining , 2005, LDV Forum.

[35]  S. T. Dumais,et al.  Using latent semantic analysis to improve access to textual information , 1988, CHI '88.

[36]  J. R. Landis,et al.  The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. , 1977, Biometrics.

[37]  L. Hilty,et al.  Scenario Analysis , 2010, Ten Laws of Operational Risk.

[38]  Vanessa A. Cooper,et al.  Green Information Systems (Green IS) Practice in Organisation: Tracing its Emergence and Recurrent Use , 2012, AMCIS.

[39]  T. Landauer,et al.  Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis , 1990 .

[40]  Stefan Feuerriegel,et al.  Reducing Price Uncertainty through Demand Side Management , 2012, ICIS.

[41]  Elena Gorbacheva,et al.  Towards a typology of business process management professionals: identifying patterns of competences through latent semantic analysis , 2016, Enterp. Inf. Syst..

[42]  Raymond F. Zammuto,et al.  Organization Science, Managers, and Language Games , 1992 .

[43]  R. Goodland.  The Concept of Environmental Sustainability , 1995 .

[44]  Lutz Kolbe,et al.  The Evolvement of Energy Informatics in the Information Systems Community - a literature Analysis and Research Agenda , 2012, ECIS.

[45]  M. F. Porter,et al.  An algorithm for suffix stripping , 1997 .

[46]  Tobias Brandt,et al.  Evaluating Scheduling Methods for Energy Cost Reduction in a Heterogeneous Data Center Environment , 2012, ECIS.

[47]  Hal Daumé,et al.  Incorporating Lexical Priors into Topic Models , 2012, EACL.

[48]  Gerardine DeSanctis,et al.  Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory , 1994 .

[49]  Anna Sidorova,et al.  Uncovering the Intellectual Core of the Information Systems Discipline , 2008, MIS Q..

[50]  Jan vom Brocke,et al.  Identifying and Characterizing Topics in Enterprise Content Management: a Latent Semantic Analysis of Vendor Case studies , 2014, ECIS.

[51]  J. J. Gibson.  The theory of affordances , 1977 .

[52]  Thorsten Staake,et al.  The effects of user identity and sanctions in online communities on real-world behavior , 2011, ICIS.

[53]  Jan Recker,et al.  Sensemaking and Sustainable Practicing: Functional Affordances of Information Systems in Green Transformations , 2013, MIS Q..

[54]  Friedemann Mattern,et al.  ICT for Green – How Computers Can Help Us to Conserve Energy , 2010 .

[55]  Dirk S. Hovorka,et al.  Analyzing unstructured text data: Using latent categorization to identify intellectual communities in information systems , 2008, Decis. Support Syst..

[56]  Saonee Sarker,et al.  Examination of the Determinants of Smart Meter Adoption: An User Perspective , 2012, ICIS.