IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 42

value propositions or business models and therefore a
competitive differentiation. The fact that both sustainability and business models have at their core human
values is an opportunity to align a company's desire
for profit with the goal of sustainable development. As
promising as this sounds, such an alignment is far
from trivial. Firstly, while sustainability depends on a
holistic long-term value consideration, not all necessary values might be appealing to a customer. Implementing values for sustainability might also cost more
than the a customer is willing to pay. It is the task of a
company to figure out how much a customer is willing
to pay for a unique value proposition. Secondly, there
is considerable tension between the aim of short-term
profitability and long-term consideration of sideeffects. The attempt to align the business model with
sustainability is surely not suitable for all short-term
profit oriented companies. A company also needs to
have a suitable corporate culture for sustainability to
be truthful.

An extensive value collection is
an additional and complementary
tool for engineering sustainable
information systems.

In our overview of values we also consider the
current influx of value lists aimed at ethically-aligned
AI development [45]-[47], [52]. As can be noted from
Table 1, tough values lists from these sources mainly
cluster around technology-centered values such as
transparency, security, privacy, accountability, and
human autonomy. At the same time, human values
such as freedom, control, maintainability, property,
human health, or community appear to be underrepresented in these efforts. Our value collection illustrates that AI developers should turn to more holistic
and interdisciplinary value lists, such as the one presented in this article.
Finally we want to stress that our value collection
cannot substitute for an extensive stakeholder-based
value elicitation approach as proposed by scholars
who have been working on values in system deisgn
[40], [42]. The VSD research community alone proposes seven unique methods that enables value elicitation [42]. Such a practice can elicit values not included
in our collection. With that in mind, we consider a

comprehensive value list as an additional tool to facilitate understanding and identifying values. A value list
can only be helpful in conjunction with established
methods for value-based engineering. As both the
business model of a company and sustainability can
be seen as having values at their core, the entire
range of VSD methods can be used to solve value tensions [50] and other challenges. Additionally, methods
for other important tasks such as prioritizing values,
stakeholder identification, and translating values into
requirements [42], [49], [50] can be found in the rich
VSD literature.

Transforming the Perceived Burden of
Sustainability into an Opportunity
Information systems have an increasing impact on individual well-being, the environment, and our society. As
a result, they are part of the global debate on sustainability. Companies today associate sustainability as a
burden resulting in extra costs. To mitigate potentially
harmful effects and enable sustainable systems, scholars suggest considering human values during system
design. As both sustainability and business models can
be understood as deeply rooted in human values, considering them during system design can transform the
perceived burden of sustainability in to an opportunity.
This article consolidates values from multiple sources
into a single extensive collection, which allows innovation teams and system designers to get an overview of
potentially relevant values, or to validate their own
value reflections. This collection can foster sustainable
information system design and the discovery of new
customer value propositions.

Acknowledgment
An earlier version of this article was presented at the
2018 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and
Society, Washington, DC, Nov. 5-6, 2018.

Author Information
The authors are with the Vienna University of Economics
and Business, Vienna, Austria. Email: till.winkler@wu.ac
.at; spiek@wu.ac.at.

References

[1] R.W. Kates, T.M. Parris and A.A. Leiserowitz, "What is sustainable development? Goals, indicators, values, and practice," Environment (Washington DC), vol. 47, pp. 8-21, 2005.
[2] J. van den Hoven, "Ethics for the Digital Age: Where Are the
Moral Specs?," in Informatics in the Future, Springer, pp. 65-67,
2017.
[3] J.M. Twenge, G.N. Martin and W.K. Campbell, "Decreases in
Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After
2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone
Technology," 2018.
[4] D. An Hign, R. Gholami and F. Shirazi, "ICT and environmental
sustainability," Telematics and Informatics, vol. 34, pp. 85-95, 2017.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019

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