ICT support for collaborative environmental compliance management in SMEs — The CCPro approach

Corporate environmental compliance management is as a work area were specialists are requested to do everything that is needed to assure compliance with given environmental protection regulations. This includes expert judgements of the relevance of regulations for the company and the preparation of ad hoc proofs of the company´s positive compliance status. Many of the compliance management obligations inherently require team efforts like group judgements and group decisions concerning compliance assurance measures. For small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) the status of ICT (information and communication technology) use in general and especially for supporting collaboration in the domain of corporate compliance management is described in this article. The description is based on empirical data and also a real world case study of a German SME production company. The work is intended to contribute that in the future more researcher initiatives from the field of collaboration technologies and systems (CTS) will be directed at the compliance management application domain. To this end the article also contains insights about a collaborative compliance management decision process that is considered to be essential for the general practice of corporate environmental compliance management. Furthermore, the compliance management information system Compliance Center Professional (CCPro) is introduced which offers integrated collaboration functionality for this collaborative decision process. The CCPro system is currently being piloted by the compliance management team of the above mentioned SME. First evaluation results obtained in a two month pilot phase are summarized and discussed in this article as well.