With the right data, you can make your sustainability objectives concrete, identify obstacles and determine the most effective ways to achieve your goals. An example? If, as a company, you want to limit your CO2 emissions, then you need to use science-based insights to know which reduction figure will really make a difference."
Relevant data can be found all over your organization: from the IT and marketing departments to customer service. Sometimes, those data are part of software programs on which you can perform relatively easy analyses, but data can also be built up from experience and expertise, or held by an external partner that may not be easily accessible.
Whichever kind of data you’re using, ensuring that your data sources are interconnected, with sound data governance and data management, is key to leveraging high quality data intelligence.
This means breaking silos and looking beyond the departmental boundaries for valuable insights. Companies don't necessarily have to implement complex new systems to do this. It’s often more efficient to capture the right data from existing systems, link them together, and then validate them.
By basing your policy choices and action plans on data, you can also communicate about them more transparently and objectively, helping to align your teams with your strategy.
A recent report from the United Nations shows that we are struggling to meet our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Why? One reason is that organizations are not using enough objective data to graft our actions onto and support our policies.
How we can help
- Translate your sustainability strategy into SMART goals and appropriate performance indicators to clearly measure progress towards your ambitions. Having an unambiguous framework makes it easier to evaluate sustainability initiatives based on their expected measurable impact. Consistently applying this evaluation method enables you to allocate resources towards the most efficient paths to success.
- Understanding data availability & quality through data cartography and formulating an appropriate action plan to strengthen trust and completeness of reported results. The need to report certain sustainability indicators will only increase over time. Companies will be forced to have at least the necessary data tracking and gathering processes in place to comply with upcoming regulations. Reported results will be under more scrutiny leaving little-to-no room for data quality issues that might jeopardize trust in reported results.
- Capturing structured manual input with review steps and data quality checks to guarantee a base level of trust and completeness for data that is difficult to gather in an automated way. Although automated source system-based data gathering is preferable, it’s clear this is not always an investment worthy and/or possible option. We believe that manually capturing relevant data, supported by appropriate governance & review processes, is a worthy and pragmatic alternative.
- Integrating various (semi-) automated data streams into an actionable dashboard that monitors progress and gives insights into drivers of relevant performance indicators to support improvement actions. Providing continuous performance tracking throughout the year makes it easier for stakeholders to stay updated with an overview, whilst reducing the lead time to identifying improvement initiatives and impact.
Discover our Trusted Sustainability insights solution:
Our Trusted Sustainability Insights solution is set-up in a scalable way. By standardizing the data model supporting the dashboards, it can efficiently be rolled-out with reporting on different KPI’s or sustainability topics. The Azure SQL DB is configured to support the standardized data model and can be connected with automated data feeds via Data Factory. Trusted Sustainability Insights accelerates the implementation of sustainability dashboards, while leaving room to tailor the solution to your specific needs.
