The link between IT and sustainability

Consumers, regulators and investors all want businesses to adopt greener practices throughout their operations. But according to Ovum, the global analyst and consulting company, two important points have largely been ignored: first, many green initiatives can actually reduce costs and boost the bottom line, rather than shrink it; second, IT has a major role to play in supporting these practices.

In a new report, entitled ‘Sustainability management: an opportunity for CIOs’, Ovum explains that CIOs who ‘get’ the second point have a chance to raise their profile and increase their strategic value to the organisation.

“Most CIOs have looked at sustainability through the narrow lens of ‘green IT’ - the energy consumption and CO₂ emissions directly tied to computing and communications,” said Warren Wilson, Senior Analyst at Ovum. “What they’re missing is the critical role that IT can play in supporting green practices across the entire organisation.”

The reason, Wilson explains in the report, is that sustainable practices aren’t something a business can simply define, deploy and forget about. Each department has unique processes and problems that must be addressed. The solutions must be monitored and analysed to make sure that they deliver the desired results, that these results are maintained over time and that they can be reported to compliance officers, regulators, customers and investors as needed.

This kind of monitoring, measurement, analysis and reporting is inevitably a data-intensive process and one that is very similar to - indeed, a natural extension of - solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) that many organisations already have deployed.

“Then, when you consider that companies will increasingly have to calculate and report the carbon footprint of products across their entire life cycle, the challenge becomes one of extended supply chain management (SCM), reaching all the way back to raw materials at their source and all the way forward to the product’s eventual disposal, re-use or recycling,” Wilson said.

The selection, deployment and management of ERP, BI and SCM solutions is largely the CIO’s responsibility. Broadening these solutions to encompass sustainability should be the CIO’s job as well, but so far, few have risen to the challenge. Then again, most organisations have only begun to develop broad sustainability initiatives and are in the earliest stages of understanding what will be required to implement and maintain them. This leaves a leadership vacuum that CIOs are well positioned to fill. Those that do can increase their strategic importance by affecting how, when and how well their organisations succeed in adopting greener practices.