Pathways to Greener Pastures: Research Opportunities to Integrate Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Business Process Management Based on a Systematic Tertiary Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors performed a tertiary literature review aimed on Sustainable Business Process Management and pointed out recommendations to incorporate social, environmental and economic aspect in contrast to conventional Business Process Management. The introductory part is exhausting, but may be interesting for the readers. The weak side of the review is the use of secondary sources that may serve generalised descriptions, however, some factors, e.g. environmental ones are hardly measured and seen even in primary sources.

Authors should use abbreviations only after they have been explained. In some sentences I would prefer to substitute a word "concrete" by "specific/particular". The pathway 5 seems to be summarized generally and an more deep insight of authors would be useful.

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The work of the authors can be understood twofold:
First, they present a comprehensive overview of the field of Sustainable BPM by analysing existing structured literature reviews on the field.
Second, they build the argument for taking a more macro/big picture look on sustainability by integrating lifecycle analysis (LCA) into it.

Both are a valuable and well written, sound contribution to the discussion on how to build a more sustainable world through sustainable BPM.

Having said that, I would like to invite the authors to give some thought on the following points:

- If sustainable BPM is in discussion for over 10 years (the oldest literature review analysed from 2012, meaning the underlying literature is even older), why is it still an emergent research field? Or is it rather a developing field?
I am not sure if Sustainable BPM will ever become truly a discipline of its own (like IS research) or if it will be rather a distinct variety of BPM research. This in no way should undermine the importance of the work done in this field but rather help to shape the communication about it.

- If the work has stayed conceptual so far, how will the integration of LCA help to overcome that? In this regard the paper at hand remains conceptual in nature. Also the challenges of trying to look at the whole product lifecycle as well as where to make the cut, could be articulated a bit more on the point.

Both questions are big in nature, but require only minor changes in the paper to address them for the paper at hand. The questions themselves could be starting points for the authors next study or applied project.

To conclude: The paper is well written. Scientifically sound with references and explicit research methods. Arguments are well presented. Two questions might find there way into some minor editing (some words, a few sentences could be enough to tackle them in this study).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx