Gartner: Use digital to achieve sustainability goals

Sustainability leaders need a range of data to track, plan, reduce risk, and deliver efficiency and growth. The problem is that more than 70% of respondents to a survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review acknowledged they were not very effective at data sharing.

Sustainability teams often waste inordinate amounts of time calculating and integrating data. Data isn’t just siloed between business units; it’s fragmented within business units. Growth in demand leads to higher energy costs, higher emissions, and so on. Without combined data, you cannot even make those calculations. Shared finance, supply chain and R&D data are particularly critical, given the central role they play in sustainability.

Gartner urges IT professionals to prepare the cultural environment for data sharing by defining it as a “business necessity”. This is a legal concept that justifies decision-making that may otherwise lead to potential legal liability. IT professionals should then work with allies, such as chief financial officers (CFOs), who will usually welcome alignment with cost savings and revenue creation. Here, IT professionals should aim to stress the importance of data collaboration over data hoarding.

To improve data sharing, Gartner recommends that every business leader has a sustainability goal that can only be reached by collaborating and sharing. IT professionals should also identify master data management maturity and gaps that need to be closed, then merge enterprise data with relevant ecosystem data using AI or ML for optimisation or improvement.

IT professionals should assess which sustainability data is relevant to share. For example, operational data in manufacturing or supply chain greenhouse gas data is often useful to centralise and apply ML and AI. This type of data is material and significant in terms of representing the organisation’s impact.

It can also be useful to have the ability to break data down to assess where to invest, such as a plant manager being able to identify poor performing kit and the need for replacement. Another example is energy use, where data can be used to track procured and consumed energy, which directly aligns with cost. It can also include shadow energy, such as end-user device consumption and recycling. Annual reporting processes and sustainability reports benefit from centralisation.

It is equally important to decide which data is not relevant to share. For example, autonomous vehicles are still under development. Even if an enterprise fully adopts autonomous vehicles, it probably doesn’t need five-second interval data centralised for sustainability purposes. Instead, it could centralise the beginning and end of a journey, and the distance travelled. Some data will be competitively sensitive and may create a moral hazard if shared inappropriately.

Data can be used to “gamify” internal behaviours, such as travel, meeting times or consumption of red meat alternatives. Balance the impact of storing, transporting and managing sustainability data versus its usefulness to make improvements.

For instance, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) is focusing on sustainability issues such as connected vehicles, charging stations, smart infrastructure and dynamic electric vehicle charging. The agency provides training tools for employees to develop the skills needed to deliver data-driven decisions and solutions.