Is your organization conscious about Digital Sustainability?
We live in an era of technological marvels. From self-driven electric cars, ‘hard-to-tackle’ virus vaccines to teams of high school students competing to design and drive first ever remote-control racers on lunar surfaces; the world of innovation seems to erupt exponentially with every blink of time. Just as technology creates opportunities for life, so is the need for an organization to be mindful of its impact on society and environment.
The times are such that an enterprise’s revenue is not the only key indicator of its success anymore. Growth is now defined by how responsible, ethical, and digitally conscious an organization is being and whether it continues to help its employees and customers thrive. Digital sustainability is an umbrella term for a holistic approach an organization can undertake to meet Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) by investing, leveraging or developing wise digital solutions. Digital systems, processes and operations along with an internal and external ecosystem of partners, customers and stakeholders, might seem like unusual places for targeting sustainability but that’s exactly where the journey begins.
Aiming for net positivity with enterprise assets
The new way of doing business in a digital world is by leveraging technologies such as the cloud, Big Data, mobile computing, process mining, AI/ML, and analytics. These generation-altering technologies provide significant improvements in the way how a business operates and delivers high quality customer experience by directly influencing consumer, consumption, operations, and supply chain.
Net positivity adds another layer to how an organization contributes to digital sustainability. There is an on-going cultural shift from ‘doing no harm’ to ‘doing more good’. Enterprises must aim at providing solutions, which eventually impact the wider social canvas. Unlike the depleting nature of natural resources, enterprise assets such as IT infrastructure, systems and processes are increasing with passage of time. At the heart of it all, lies a humongous store of data.
By 2025, it is estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally.
The challenge here is not overuse but underutilization. It is important for an organization and its ecosystem of stakeholders to have clear visibility and understanding of the data, churned out by various departments and functions to foster a culture of trust and transparency.
How can your enterprise make digital sustainability commonplace
Data as a sustainable digital asset: This age calls for a knowledge-based society rather than a resource-based one. Knowledge in this evolving economy could be equated to data assets. They are no longer just a means to the end of achieving sustainable development, but it is crucial for data to be sustainable as well. While over-consumption is a problem when it comes to natural resources, underuse is a massive challenge when it comes to data. Companies often miss achieving desired result due to bad data quality or poor data discoverability. If your organization uses multiple BI tools, it only makes sense to invest in an integrated analytics catalog. This tool not only enables in resolving data access issues but highly encourages decision makers, business users, and data experts to collaborate and consume analytics and data assets in a meaningful way. After all, trusted data creates sustainable enterprises.
Empowering stakeholders for digital sustenance:
· Customers — Making sustainability visible inside and outside the company is crucial. Be strong advocates of ‘Thoughtful Modernization’. Encourage an environment of continuous evaluation and feedback to measure and communicate success as well as failures. It doesn’t end with project implementation. Provide all necessary means to customers to enable them to deliver the right impact in the secondary markets.
· Employees — The recent pandemic has changed the way we live, work and experience our daily lives. While some changes are positive, some are highly debatable. Employees form the nucleus of a digital sustainability drive. A culture of inclusivity and acknowledgment with mental wellness assistance, monthly online get-togethers to celebrate talent and to necessitate ‘water cooler breaks’ along with logistic support for a growing digital workforce, promotes happy workplaces across geographies.
Start Small. Start now.
Aiming to build a digitally sustainable enterprise is not a sprint. It is a marathon. For Enquero, the sustainability journey has only grown stronger over the years by helping customers and employees make net positive choices.
If digital sustainability is yet to catch on as one of the key strategic initiatives in your organization, starting small and starting now sets the right tone for this new year. The following are a few steps to help you ease in:
· Set goals, mapping them to UN’s SDGs and define achievable timebound digital initiatives by careful evaluation of risks and impacts
· Evaluate current processes, operations and systems to identify scope of leveraging intelligent automation and cloud technologies to reduce digital waste
· Be mindful of your data. Promote transparency and governed data access across your organization by setting up teams, who champion the cause of using analytics to drive accelerated response to avoid supply chain breakage
· Educate your employees about digital sustainability and equip them with specialized skills. Include them in strategizing tech roadmaps to drive a bigger vision
· Keep an open channel of communication with your customers, partners and try to find that ‘sweet spot’, where digital sustainability becomes a shared goal
Last but not the least, let us start caring about sustainability from a digital perspective. ‘There is no planet B’, at least, not in the next few decades. Enquero is already out there head-on prioritizing Digital Sustainability by optimizing processes, operations and infrastructure. What’s holding you back?
**Disclaimer : Ideas expressed are mine based on my exposure to a company that practices and encourages digital sustainability.
