Developing an IT Maturity Model for Sustainable Supply Chain Management Implementation

Many organisations are currently involved in implementing Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) initiatives to address societal expectations and government regulations. Implementation of these initiatives has in turn created complexity due to the involvement of collection, management, control, and monitoring of a wide range of additional information exchanges among trading partners, which was not necessary in the past. Organisations thus would rely more on meaningful support from their IT function to help them implement and operate SSCM practices. Given the growing global recognition of the importance of sustainable supply chain (SSC) practices, existing corporate IT strategy and plans need to be revisited for IT to remain supportive and aligned with new sustainability aspirations of their organisations. Towards this goal, in this paper we report on the development of an IT maturity model specifically designed for SSCM context. The model is built based on four dimensions derived from software process maturity and IS/IT planning literatures. Our proposed model defines four progressive IT maturity stages for corporate IT function to support SSCM implementation initiatives. Some implications of the study finding and several challenges that may potentially hinder acceptance of the model by organisations are discussed.