Managing the Complexity in Ethical, Social and Environmental Accounting: Engineering and Evaluating a Modelling Language

Abstract

Assessing, reporting, and monitoring ethical, social and environmental is a key practice for sustainable business innovation. There are a plethora of methods that guide these assessments. Often these methods are supported by an ICT tool. In most cases, the tools are developed to support a single method only and do not allow any tailoring. Therefore, they are rigid and inflexible. To mitigate the risk of managerial problems, reporting fatigue, loss of confidence in sustainability practices, and to manage complexity in ESEA methods we offer a new model-driven approach. We have developed an open-source, model-driven, versatile tool, called openESEA. OpenESEA parses and interprets textual models, that are specified according to a domain-specific language (DSL). This article reports on a new iteration of the creation process of our modelling language, describes the most important modelling primitives of the DSL, and reports on the validation of the DSL through user testing.