The role of enterprise IT in sustainable development operating within the EU green deal

Abstract

This dissertation evaluates how enterprise IT, specifically ESG reporting software and business intelligence (BI) systems, enables sustainability reporting quality and evidence-based governance at Transport Malta (TM). The motivation is the limited integrated organisational-level evidence in the literature on how enterprise IT translates into reporting quality through governance mechanisms, particularly in small-state public-sector regulators operating under EU Green Deal pressure. A pragmatic, mixed-methods single-case study design was adopted, integrating three complementary evidence streams: directed content analysis of an eight-document corpus of TM and TM-adjacent strategy and reporting documents, yielding 340 coded extracts; three semi-structured interviews with senior staff (the Chief Information Officer, the Deputy Chief Officer for Sustainable Mobility, and a Senior Manager in ICT); and a staff questionnaire of thirty targeted respondents. The findings characterise TM as an organisation undergoing visible IT modernisation but constrained by federated data governance that is designed yet not fully operationalised. Sustainability reporting remains narrative rather than metric and externally dependent. The central diagnostic finding is a within-instrument gap of 1.18 Likert points between perceived reporting quality (mean 4.03) and perceived data governance (mean 2.85), a measurable signature of public-sector policy–practice decoupling. The findings suggest that legitimacy of the output layer has outpaced the cross-departmental data governance capability required to sustain it: cross-departmental coordination capability, not tooling, is the binding constraint on enterprise-IT value for sustainability reporting at TM. The dissertation contributes a concrete measure of decoupling in a small-state administrative setting and translates this into six practical recommendations for TM, anchored on a Sustainability and IT Coordination Forum, a shared sustainability-data glossary and a unified enterprise ESG reporting model aligned with EU frameworks.