How to set up your sustainability IT and data organisation for success

It’s a huge task to become a sustainable organisation, and the ones that find it easiest are those built around sustainability from the outset, while established, large enterprises carry the legacy of earlier practices. Technology therefore provides a useful focus for transformation, because it touches people, processes and services throughout the organisation.

Efficiency gains alone aren’t enough to become a sustainable organisation: that requires transformation across the whole enterprise, not simply in functional silos. That may seem daunting, but a holistic perspective with a modular approach can make both near- and long-term components manageable, and helps achieve buy-in at functional and enterprise levels.

Businesses don’t know the practical steps toward becoming sustainable organisations, and the sheer volume of information makes it hard to see a clear way forward. A blueprint is essential, and even a generic one gives leaders a broad picture of the territory, to clarify the actions needed.

We’ve identified five steps to becoming a sustainable organisation:

• Commit to a Climate & Sustainability change aspiration
• Develop a Climate & Sustainability change strategy
• Align your organisational model
• Enhance organisational capability
• Regularly monitor and report

To clarify who does what in a successful transformation, we created a framework that describes the roles of common business functions in a sustainability transformation, covering more than 100 distinct actions from starting points to leading practices.

Those actions might require new capabilities, and demand for sustainability skills is increasing. Meanwhile, today’s talent pool is often rejecting companies with poor sustainability credentials, so it’s important to have a clear, open and authentic sustainability strategy, which resonates with the values of talent you need.

Doing something is better than doing nothing, and technology can be a useful focus for practical action. We hope this series of articles helps your organisation to transform from “doing Sustainability” to “being sustainable.”