Chief Information Officers Take Center Stage on ESG Strategies
As environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies climb the list of priorities at organizations worldwide, chief information officers find themselves playing an increasingly central role in ESG efforts.
Today’s ESG efforts are often ad hoc, siloed, and manual, with data and operations scattered across disparate systems in an organization.
Digital transformation presents a powerful opportunity for companies to turn ESG efforts into impact and business value, and the CIO has a front-row seat to how digital transformation is intersecting with every facet of the business.
With enterprise data at the heart of a company’s ESG strategy, CIOs — with their compete view of the interdependencies and interactions between people, processes, and technologies across every business function — are critical to advancing ESG objectives.
Chris Bedi, chief digital information officer at ServiceNow, says it’s up to the CIO to inform the rest of the organization of the environmental impact in terms of energy usage in data centers and business processes or advise on hardware and software purchase optimization.
The CIO is also responsible for managing technology lifecycles and informing governance policies that promote data trust and transparency. “It’s incumbent upon the CIO to make innovation decisions and direct technology purchases with ESG in mind,” he says.
From Bedi’s perspective, an effective ESG program needs to be embedded into a company’s business strategy, culture, and values across global operations.
When ESG efforts are siloed end everyday business decisions aren’t linked, it presents real business risks — suppliers chosen through procurement affect a company’s carbon footprint, risk profile, and data privacy.
Workplace services created by facilities affect employee health, equity, and prospective talent, while data accuracy maintained by multiple groups affects transparency in reporting.
“There are hundreds of ESG point-products in the market that support discreet, disconnected ESG efforts, compounding the problem,” he says. “And companies rely on different operational systems that support individual, siloed processes.”
Ben Kruse, director of global ESG reporting and insights at AT&T, explains that CIOs can help advance ESG efforts in two ways: First, they can lend their teams’ resources and expertise to enhance efficiencies and controls supporting the collection and reporting of ESG data.
Second, they can take steps within their IT organizations to contribute to ESG goals such as emissions reduction targets — such as through network optimization and virtualization efforts that help reduce energy consumption.
“More and more companies, including AT&T, are committing to net-zero emissions,” Kruse explains. “We’re progressing toward a goal to reach net zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2035. And we’ve set a goal to develop connectivity solutions that help our business customers collectively reduce a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.”
As part of AT&T’s gigaton goal, Equinix, a digital infrastructure company, works with AT&T to provide highly secure access to energy-efficient digital infrastructure, helping corporate customers accelerate their digital transformations and lower emissions.
“Together, we’re providing a solution that lets customers migrate their data from on-site IT infrastructure to more efficient cloud-based infrastructure,” Kruse says. “This isn’t about helping customers shift emissions from Scope 2 to Scope 3. Cloud-based solutions operating at scale can offer greater energy efficiency than an individual corporate network — reducing overall emissions for all players.”
Kruse explains that like many companies, AT&T is implementing efforts to aggregate data from dozens of legacy databases and systems into centralized platforms that will simplify analysis and compilation of datasets such as our greenhouse gas inventory.
