Four-Dimensional Sustainable E-Services

E-services are not sustainable, unless we specifically design for sustainability along four dimensions (4D): economical, technical, environmental, and social. Economic sustainability to ensure that e-services create economic value; technical sustainability so that their technical assets actually enable the e-services to cope with changes; environmental sustainability to avoid that e-services harm the environment they operate in, and social sustainability to ensure e-services provide fair exchange of information between parties. Designing 4D-sustainable e-services is very complex. So far, service-engineering research has left dealing with such complexity unassisted—mainly due to the many initial technical challenges that needed to be overcome. Our goal is to fill this gap, by modeling the fundamentals of 4D-sustainable e-services. We propose a conceptual approach for representing 4D-sustainability. Our goal is to enhance the shared understanding amongst sustainability stakeholders, and to ease sustainability assessment and negotiation. Our approach offers a number of interrelated core elements (common among the four sustainability dimensions) as well as dimension-specific elements, variable elements. By focusing on 4D core elements, we enable describing the essence of sustainable e-services in a unified manner. We illustrate the value of the conceptual model using a real-life case study featuring an airport baggage handling system.