INTEGRATING SUSTAINABILITY THINKING IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS – EXPERIENCES FROM AN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE COURSE

The rapid changes in the environment and our societies have raised the importance of incorporating Sustainability Thinking in all our courses. However, this is more challenging for some subject areas than others. Although Sustainability Thinking has long been a tradition in some of the engineering subjects, this is a far greater challenge for students of more abstract subjects such as Computer Science and Information Systems. The challenges in understanding sustainability are not only for our students; it is also hard for teachers to conceive how Information Systems could impact the UN SDGs in positive and negative ways. The question that many Information Systems teachers are asking is how we could incorporate Sustainability Thinking into the courses. This paper is aimed at sharing experiences from an Information Systems course on Enterprise Architecture for Enterprise Innovation, where we have integrated the ideas of Sustainability Thinking and sustainable innovation in enterprises. We have taken a step-by-step approach to introduce the basic ideas of Sustainability Thinking and to integrate them into the learning activities. The main research question addressed in this paper is how to integrate Sustainability Thinking into a course on Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Innovation. The approach that we have taken is to integrate Sustainability Thinking as a part of the contents and activities in the course rather than enhance the syllabus by adding sustainability related content as an additional subject. The paper describes the course and how Sustainability Thinking has been integrated into the curriculum and the learning activities. An assessment of students’ awareness of sustainability and their attitudes to applying the ideas in their future work in designing IS are also presented.