A decision support system architecture for the development and
implementation of ESG strategies at SMEs
Authors: Markopoulos Evangelos , Al Katheeri Haseena , Al Qayed Hamdan 
Published: February 2023

Strategic management and business development can be delivered easier in
large scale organizations and Multinational Enterprisers (MNEs) due to their
excess in human resources, expertise and time orientation. Small and Medium
Size Enterprises (SMEs) on the other hand operate in unpredicted
environments, with limited resources aiming for their survival first and
then their development. The contrast between the two types of enterprises
seems chaotic in numbers but not in plans and intentions. The contribution
of the MNEs to national economies and impact to the society and the
environment can be measured with a variety of standards, metrics and
practices such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the Environmental,
Social and Governance Index (ESG), the Social Responsible Investments (SRI)
and other. On the other hand, SMEs that also have direct impact to the
society, the local and regional economy, the employment, and offer the same,
if not more, opportunities to their limited human resources in terms of
skills development and effort recognition, cannot record and report such
actions, plans and strategies and recognized for their responsible
management and leadership. The ESG criteria help organizations develop
reputational capital that evolves into financial capital. However, the
effort and investments needed to score on the ESG indexes is forbidden for
the SMEs who intentionally or intention successfully delivering ESG
activities, in a smaller scale, without a system to record and report them.
This paper introduces the core design of a decision support system that
guides SMEs to maps their operations against the ESG criteria. An extensive
literature review has been conducted to identity software systems that
coordinate, propose and support ESG activities and analyze elements of such
systems that can be extracted for the development of a light system. Such a
system, with the relevant enhancements, presented in this paper can be
useful tool for the SMEs to report their ESG performance. The system
functions as an assessment tool providing a staged evaluation of the SMEs
activities, identifies ESG gaps and proposes actions needed to fulfill the
requirements of ESG criteria. The final output of the system graphs the
distance between the current and the target stage of the SME on the most
common ESG criteria. However, the proposed system does not evaluate the
scale of each ESG activity implementation but its existence in the SME
operations and the degree of its adaptation. The paper also highlights the
pre and post conditions for the utilization of the proposed technology using
a process map, the social economic impact, research limitations and areas of
further research. The goal of this research is to indicate that SMEs can and
should be awarded ESG scores as well. For this SMEs can use such supportive
technologies to direct them towards ESG compliance, and report achievements
and contributions that can help them attract investments needed for them to
keep on delivering a greater contribution the local, and why not
international, economy and society.