The role of technology in sustainability

Is your investment in technology helping deliver your sustainability strategy?  

Technology can play a vital role in enabling your sustainability strategy and helping you hit your sustainability targets. Indirectly, new technology capabilities can enable your sustainability strategy by, for example, reporting and measuring progress, analysing emissions data, nudging customer and colleague behaviour, enabling product innovation, supporting the ‘greening’ of supply chains, and reducing travel and office footprint. Directly, changes in technology operations can reduce your environmental impact by, for example, reducing energy consumption, increasing renewable energy share, prolonging hardware lifespan and offsetting emissions.    

What practical steps can leaders take to realise the sustainability benefits of technology?  

Most organisations procure their technology from an ecosystem of vendors and partners including Systems Integrators, outsourcing partners, X-as-a-Service and on-premise providers, software and hardware vendors and specialist advisory and consulting service providers. Consequently, aligning your sustainability strategy with technology procurement and supplier management is likely an effective way of furthering your sustainability agenda. While every organisation’s approach to achieving this will be different, there are some common areas to focus on.  

• Do you have a clear technology sustainability strategy? 

A technology sustainability strategy will outline the technology capabilities and tools your wider organisation needs to enable its sustainability strategy. It will also define the sustainability objectives your technology organisations should achieve as part of your wider sustainability strategy. This strategy will help your technology procurement and operational teams chart their sustainability journey. It will also maximise the benefit of your investment in green technology by ensuring alignment with your wider sustainability agenda.  

Our recommendation: If you aren’t sure if your technology and sustainability strategies are aligned, a strategy day between your technology and sustainability leaders is an easy first step toward getting clarity and alignment.  

• Are you procuring the right tools?  

From a technology procurement perspective, your sustainable technology strategy is a vital starting point. The sustainable technology market is growing quickly. There are a plethora of tools organisations can procure to help further their sustainability agenda. From green supply chain applications and sustainable ERP to AI powered network optimisation platforms, there is no shortage of possibilities. As with all emerging technology markets in the earlier stages of the hype-cycle, it can be difficult for organisations to ensure they are procuring the right thing for them. This is where your sustainable technology strategy can help by steering your technology organisation toward those capabilities that will be most impactful for your organisation and those that are most aligned with your overall sustainability strategy.  

Our recommendation: When it comes to sustainability tools and capabilities, start small, keep it simple, invest carefully, experiment, iterate and think about your roadmap. The market is quite difficult to navigate (products tend to be quite complex and the market hasn’t consolidated yet) so most organisations aren’t ideally placed to make big investment and procurement decisions quite yet.  

• How green are your technology operations? 

Your organisation’s technology operations maybe a significant contributor to your overall environmental footprint. On-premise infrastructure significantly increases energy consumption compared to the cloud. Poor management of hardware increases waste (hardware gets ‘lost’) and increases hardware inventory (hardware utilisation is lower as sharing is less common). A ‘buy new’ device strategy can materially increase an organisation’s direct emissions compared to a reuse/refurbish first approach. How an organisation disposes of its unwanted hardware impacts its indirect emissions; the more that is recycled the greater the environmental benefit.  

Our recommendation: This is an area where organisations can make significant sustainability gains quickly. A discovery exercise to identify ‘quick-wins’ is a good starting point: What can be migrated to the cloud from on-prem or private cloud? How can hardware inventory be rationalised and hardware management improved? Are we reusing and refurbishing wherever we can? How much of our unwanted hardware is recycled?  

• Are you thinking about the green cloud’? 

Moving from on-prem to cloud-based infrastructure is a big step in reducing the environmental impact of your technology operations. Going beyond this, cloud vendors are improving the sustainability of their operations and differentiating themselves from their competition on sustainability grounds. Often referred to as the green cloud, X-as-a-Service providers are taking steps to reduce the environmental impact of their infrastructure and platforms by: 

• Reducing energy consumption 
• Increasing data storage density 
• Consolidating more demand into fewer data centres 
• Shifting to renewable energy 
• Providing customers with environmental impact data and reporting tools 
• Extending hardware life 
• Adopting sustainable software development and management practices 
• Optimising application architectures for cloud infrastructure 

The on-prem to cloud to green cloud transition is underway, but organisations need to think carefully about the environmental proposition green cloud vendors are selling. It can be difficult to see through the claims and data that underpin the green cloud sales pitch: How much is offsetting versus emissions reduction? Does the geographic footprint of the vendor’s infrastructure suggest a real commitment to sustainability? What percentage of energy usage comes from renewables? What standards do they use for emissions reporting? The problem of ‘greenwashing’ is increasingly common which means organisations need to do their due diligence before committing to a green cloud vendor.  

Our recommendation: Some cloud providers are leading the way in terms of sustainability. They are pursuing ambitious sustainability strategies, have a clear sustainability roadmap guiding their investments in this area, and are regularly deploying product innovations to help their customers reduce their environmental impact. Benchmarking current cloud suppliers (or on-prem infrastructure) against green cloud market leaders to quantify the sustainability opportunity of transitioning is a positive first step toward the green cloud.  

For some organisations, technology has the potential to transform their environmental footprint. For most, it could be a critical enabler to help them realise their sustainability goals. Adopting a holistic ‘green tech’ approach, across technology strategy, procurement and operations is the most effective means of realising this opportunity. At its heart, adopting a ‘green tech’ approach is a business change problem: How do we get the teams buying our technology services, managing our technology suppliers and running our technology operations to think and act differently? No easy task.  

Do you need change expertise? 

The Project One team are business change specialists with deep experience helping organisations design and deliver complex change. Why not get in touch to have a chat about your ‘green tech’ change agenda? Contact theteam@projectone.com