Speaker: Daria Stumkat

Abstract: As sustainability shifts from a peripheral concern to a strategic priority, organizations must increasingly align sustainability and IT, introducing a new frontier for strategic alignment. Based on a completed research paper accepted for the “IS for Sustainability” track at ICIS 2025, this talk examines how alignment between sustainability and IT emerges in organizational practice. Drawing on six months of immersive fieldwork in a large European IT service provider in the banking sector, the study shows an instance where formal strategy processes only weakly integrate IT and sustainability, while substantial alignment arises informally at project and operational levels. These findings reframe alignment as a dynamic, multi-path process rather than a static outcome of top-down planning.

Short Bio: Daria Stumkat is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the University of Münster. She works across the Chair of Digital Innovation and the Public Sector (Prof. Tobias Brandt) and the Chair of Business Process Management (Prof. Jan vom Brocke) and is part of the Flow Factory research initiative on AI-driven process innovation in financial services.

Her research explores the shifting relationship between sustainability and digital technologies as sustainability gains strategic importance  in organizational contexts. Drawing on qualitative, practice-based methods, she studies how actors in highly regulated contexts navigate competing demands around cost efficiency, environmental impact, and technological innovation.