15. Organisational responsibility improvement cycle

Abstract

A responsible organization is an organization that performs according to ethical values, taking care of the impact of their activities on society and on the environment, beyond its legal obligations. They typically care about their impacts and externalities. That is, they care about their ethical, social and environmental (ESE) topics, which represent phenomena that organizations or individuals are (or should be) concerned about, related to organizational ethics (a.k.a. governance topics), societal issues or environmental concerns. While responsible organizations might want to improve their business ethics and their performance on ESE topics, they can only do this, incrementally, over the years. And for this, they tend to enact a continuous improvement cycle that four coarse-grained activities; namely, (i) materiality assessment, (ii) impact measurement, (iii) improvement planning, and (iv) organizational reengineering. Materiality assessment is the process of determining which ESE topics are material (relevant) to an organization; which aspects should be disclosed, reported and managed. Impact measurement is a broad and heterogeneous family of methods that aims at measuring the positive and/or negative effects of some phenomenon on a portion of the social or natural environment, using quantitative and/or qualitative approaches. Improvement planning is the strategic management process of determining a set of short and long-term actions to improve the performance of an organization on ESE topics. Organizational reengineering is executing the improvement actions in the improvement plan, so as to improve the organization as intended. When enterprise models exist, these are updated. Eventually, different aspects of the organization are changed; for instance, business processes, organizational structure, data models, policies and business rules, information and communication technology. We present a reference method model for the overall improvement cycle and present dotChange, a suite of open-source software applications that supports the cycle activities.