12

From Strategy to Execution – Lead with Purpose and Deliver Progress Quickly

Intentions are nothing without action, but action is nothing without intention. Progress happens when your intentions and actions become the same thing.

– Steven Bartlett

This final chapter will focus on how we go from strategy to execution. Everything so far in this book has prepared you meticulously for this moment, where we will turn theory into practice. From my experience, I know it will sometimes feel daunting and overwhelming because not everyone will be as excited and determined as you to drive the sustainable IT agenda forward.

First, we will cover courageous sustainable leadership, senior executive support, and engagement from employees across the business to embark on this journey. Second, we will understand how to deliver progress quickly to gain momentum. Finally, we bring everything together by summarizing the key learnings and recommendations from each chapter.

The main objectives of this chapter are for you to get started on your sustainable IT journey and set yourself up for success.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Courageous sustainable leadership
  • Uniting sustainability and technology
  • The 5Cs to secure successful digital transformation
  • Bringing everything together

By the end of this chapter, you will understand the importance of courageous sustainable leadership and the key attributes that distinguish the top technology leaders. Sanjay Podder from Accenture and founder of Green Software Foundation (GSF) will share his perspective on uniting sustainability and technology to deliver business value. You will hear also from Teemu Salmi, former Group CIO at Stora Enso and now CEO at NIXU Corporation, and his 5Cs for successful digital transformation, including sustainability. Finally, we will summarize the key aspects of this book, reiterate recommendations from each chapter, and discuss the importance of staying the course and having your long-term goal in mind. Let us jump into this final chapter.

Courageous sustainable leadership

To embark on this journey, you must exuberate courageous sustainable leadership. You will also need senior executive support but also buy-in from employees across the business. From my experience, not everyone will be overjoyed, be in your corner, and back you up 100%. You will need a bit of stubbornness and grit, and it is essential to prove the value of being sustainable to the business to overcome some of these hurdles along the way. From my own experience, I know the importance of continuing to push and not getting discouraged by doubters and naysayers. Change is hard, and as humans, we are not wired for constant change and often view it as a threat. When we see change as a threat, it might generate anxiety because we feel our environment’s demands are too great and are being pushed past our breaking point or threshold for coping.

I have found that when we mention that we need to invest in sustainability, it is associated with cost or compliance requirements; it is not commonly viewed as a competitive differentiator. Punching out a corporate sustainability report or impact report every year is no longer good enough. Embedding “misleading” or “falsified” information in your sustainability marketing or your ESG practices can negatively affect your brand, your trust in the marketplace, and ultimately your top and bottom line. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have made spreading misleading or falsified information illegal.

Three recent notable examples are the French energy company TotalEnergy, the Dutch subsidiary of Air France KLM, and Swedish fast-fashion giant H&M. The plaintiff in a lawsuit against TotalEnergy claims that the company’s most recent rebranding campaign is deceptive because it continues to invest in fossil fuels despite its commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (Evans 2022). KLM is being sued over an ad campaign it claims violates European consumer law by deceiving the public about how environmentally friendly its flights are (Deutsch, Ridley, and Jessop 2022). In July 2022, H&M came under heavy scrutiny as a lawsuit was filed in New York federal court over alleged “greenwashing” and false advertising over the sustainability of its clothing (Wicker 2022). None of these lawsuits have been settled in or out of court, but it shows that the public pressure is mounting, and false ESG claims will no longer be tolerated.

A few years back, sustainability was often not viewed as an executive board topic and instead something that the sustainability manager further down in the organization should manage. Now, the tables are turning, and the role of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) is growing in importance. In a Gartner poll of 175 executives, 42% of CSOs report to the CEO, while 34% of chief ESG officers or heads of ESG report to the CEO (Gartner Inc 2022). Visa, HP, Google, and Schneider Electric are examples of companies that have appointed a CSO.

CEO priorities are rapidly shifting, and in Gartner’s Business Quarterly publication released in the second quarter of 2022, CEOs are starting to view environmental sustainability as a competitive differentiator (Gartner Inc 2022 Q2). Furthermore, they plan to invest in new and superior products and services in the next 2 years – the primary driver is competitive differentiation.

Environmental sustainability

Being a sustainable leader takes much courage. It means you must challenge the conventional ways of doing business with contrarian views, a fact-based approach, and a growth mindset. A leader that exemplifies courageous sustainable leadership to me is Henrik Henriksson. A former CEO of Scania, current CEO of H2 Green Steel, and author of Sustainability Leadership – a Swedish approach to transforming your company, your industry, and the world, Henrik had a long and successful career behind him and had an influential position as CEO of Scania, a major Swedish manufacturer focusing on commercial vehicles – heavy lorries, trucks, and buses. Scania had set an ambitious goal to transform their vehicles from diesel into electric engines and offer transportation as a service and was well on its journey. As the transportation sector is a large consumer of aluminum and steel, Henrik felt he could be part of a revolution and reshape an entire industry and even the world. Therefore, he decided to leave Scania after almost 24 years at the company and join H2 Green Steel as the CEO, a company with a strong purpose to accelerate the decarbonization of hard-to-abate industries. With strong purpose and determination, Henrik set out together with a small, newly formed team to transform the industry to produce low-carbon steel. Within 18 months, Henrik and his team were able to secure financing, prove the commercial viability of their product, build an organization, and get environmental approval to build a brand-new factory in Boden in the Northern part of Sweden.

In a few years, the factory will be in production, and H2 Green Steel will be able to produce low-carbon steel for the industry. By 2025, the target is to produce 2.5 million tons of steel per year, whereas 1.5 million tons of the production capacity is already secured in long-term contracts of 5 to 7 years. Even though customers will pay a premium of 25% over normal conventional steel, the demand for low-carbon steel exceeds any expectations the company might have had. In September 2022, the business revealed that it had just finished a €190 million financing round. This accomplishment represents a genuine vote of confidence in H2 Green Steel. It demonstrates that despite the current unpredictability in the global markets, an endeavor with a good business case and a strong, sustainable purpose is unquestionably attractive to investors. Henrik and his team at H2 Green Steel are well on their way to changing the industry and maybe even the world.

We are moving at an unprecedented pace driven by macro trends such as digitalization, electrification, and sustainability. The sense of certainty, stability, and familiarity that individuals were used to has been replaced by a constant condition of change. The abbreviation VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, can be used to describe this kind of setting. Technology leaders must be able to adapt to emerging ESG requirements from the market and customers, shift toward environmental priorities from your CEO or the board, and meet regulatory sustainability requirements such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or SEC climate disclosure ruling.

What distinguishes the top technology leaders? Listening to Dan Roberts, the Tech Whisperers podcast host, is an excellent source to find out the answer. He has interviewed some of the best business and technical leaders that are the pinnacle industry shapers and market makers. According to Dan, what sets the leaders apart from the herd is that they have H. E. A. R. T. The abbreviation stands for Humility, Empathy, Adaptability, Resilience, and Transparency (Roberts 2022). Furthermore, Dan elaborates that those courageous sustainable leaders recognize that they do not have all the answers and they need to balance high EQ leadership with taking tough decisions, holding people accountable, and tangibly producing results (Roberts 2022).

Being a courageous sustainable leader is an essential ingredient, but you cannot achieve greatness alone. Another critical aspect is uniting technology and sustainability, which we will explore further in the next section.

Uniting technology and sustainability

In this section, Sanjay Podder, Managing Director, Global Lead for Technology Sustainability Innovation, Accenture, shares his perspective on the need to unite technology and sustainability to get the full value from your sustainable tech strategy. Sanjay is a thought leader within the sustainable IT space, and he is also a founder and steering member of the Green Software Foundation (GSF).

How to get the full value from your sustainable tech strategy

Sustainability has moved swiftly up the executive agenda in recent years. Beyond the great promise of protecting people and the planet, companies with a higher sustainability performance – across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators – perform better financially than their peers (United Nationals Global Compact & Accenture 2021). Just as digital transformation required every company to become a technology company, with technology at its heart, now, every business needs to become sustainable – and technology is again taking center stage.

Technology is – and will continue to be – the fundamental driver of sustainability for organizations and their supply chains, customers, and broader business ecosystems. 92% of companies in a 2021 Accenture survey said they aim to achieve net-zero targets by 2030, which will require deploying advanced technologies to measure, reduce, and remove an organization’s carbon footprint. Technology is essential to improving transparency and traceability in global supply chains. It helps companies uncover insights to spur action, whether that means transforming customer experiences or building a more sustainable organization.

Many companies have begun to pilot and scale use cases that harness technology to drive sustainability. There are clear benefits in doing so. An analysis by Accenture shows companies that adopt sustainable technology, to a significant extent, achieve 4% higher ESG scores on the Arabesque S-Ray dataset – a global specialist in measuring ESG metrics – than those that do not (Accenture 2022). This can translate into an 11% jump in their ESG ranking. And between 2013 and 2020, companies with consistently high ESG performance tended to generate 2.6x higher total shareholder returns compared to those with mid-range ESG scores.

So, what’s holding back organizations? For many, the transformation is daunting. Nearly one-fifth of organizations say their biggest challenge is that they are not aware of the unintended consequences of technology. The lack of ready solutions is a big concern, as is the complexity associated with adopting these solutions. And then, there is what we call the intent–action gap – only 7% of companies have fully integrated their business, technology, and sustainability strategies.

Together, the C-suite, with the CIO as the catalyst for change, can accelerate transformation by formulating an effective, sustainable technology strategy. An example of an effective strategy is achieving sustainability at scale. It involves orchestrating an ecosystem of businesses, technology companies, startups, non-profits, and government organizations to harness technology in entirely new ways to solve the “wicked problems” of this decade and deliver sustainable outcomes.

Sustainability at scale – translating strategy into action

No single organization can hope to address global sustainability challenges and create impact at scale on its own. Companies must rethink their use of technology to drive urgent action beyond the boundaries of their organizations. Ecosystems will help revolutionize the use of technology and drive sustainability at scale. Digital technologies can align the entire ecosystem to find innovative and scalable solutions that address today’s most persistent and retractable problems. While most companies have (or are developing) an ecosystem strategy, translating them into action requires companies to consider three imperatives.

Design standards, specifications, and certifications for sustainable technology

Current sustainable technology initiatives are missing a few critical ingredients. For example, there’s a distinct lack of design standards and specifications and people trained in developing sustainable software. Accenture and Microsoft – along with GitHub and Thoughtworks – are founding members of the Green Software Foundation (GSF) (Accenture 2021). This aims to build an ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and practices to reduce carbon emissions generated by software development. It’s the first such industry consortium born out of a desire to meet the ICT sector’s goal of achieving a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030.

Open data-sharing to advance sustainability

Ecopetrol, Accenture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have come together to build a groundbreaking industry platform. It enables ecosystem participants to share data and create a single source of truth to optimize water management and promote water reuse between and within industries. Ecopetrol is working hard to improve the environment for the communities where it operates. It aims to reduce freshwater capture by 66% and eliminate all discharges to surface water by 2045.

Use technology to create impact at the last mile

Businesses must partner with start-ups and nonprofits to re-envision and amplify their impact at the last mile with technology. Look at charity: water. This nonprofit has provided clean, safe drinking water to nearly 15 million people in 29 countries. It’s partnered with Accenture Labs’ Tech4Good program to build an anomaly detection system that spots potential malfunctions with pump sensors so that repair mechanics can be dispatched as quickly as possible. The system uses data science, machine learning (ML), advanced probabilistic models, and cloud-connected pump sensors.

Delivering on the sustainability agenda through sustainable technology

Delivering on the sustainability agenda will be impossible without technology. However, companies must also look at the other side of the equation – one that’s often neglected: making the technology itself more sustainable. This will help organizations respond to customer, investor, and employee demands while shaping a brighter future for people and the planet. CIOs must take a fresh look at their technology through the lens of sustainability. Creating and implementing a comprehensive sustainable technology strategy – one that makes technology more sustainable and uses that technology to drive sustainability at scale – is now the core mission of the purpose-driven CIO.

In this section, Teemu Salmi, former Group CIO at Stora Enso and current CEO at Nixu Corporation, shares his perspective on how you can drive digital transformation through leveraging the 5Cs. The framework is not specific to sustainability transformation and is more generic, but it is applicable for any type of large-scale transformation endeavor.

The 5Cs to secure successful digital transformation

I often get the question, “How come Stora Enso has been so successful in the progress of your digital transformation journey?” It is a question that is not so easy to answer, and I do not think there is a silver bullet available. Transformation and change are challenging for organizations since they usually impact the company’s individuals. This generates resistance to change and is a killer for creating and running an innovative organization. However, there are ways to address this situation: having an open and transparent agenda around sustainable digital transformation. By fostering a transparent and open environment, inclusiveness and participation are created. At the end of the day, if innovation is rewarded, the circle is closed by creating an environment for open innovation.

On top of the open innovation environment, more specific activities are needed to secure a successful sustainable digital transformation agenda. These activities are built around the 5Cs, and I will elaborate on that in this section.

The first C is related to C-level commitment. The digital transformation agenda must be on the table for most of the senior leadership team in the company. If the CEO and the rest of the C-levels are not on top of and supporting the digital innovation agenda, it will not happen. Please remember that the digital transformation agenda is not about technology but how technology can accelerate the business transformation agenda for your company. Thus, the C-level must own and buy into the transformation agenda for it to be successful.

The second C is attributed to capital. Any company that wants to drive a digital transformation needs funding to make it happen – that is, capital allocation is crucial for success. An outspoken vision and idea without any capital to make it happen are just going to end as a simple vision. Capital should also be connected to value generation. This means that the benefits for the venture should already be identified in the ideation phase, and there should already be a view on how to reap the benefits from the investments when and if the venture scales up. This does not mean that a full-blown return on investment plan needs to be there, but an articulated view of how to capitalize on the idea if it would be proven good and scalable.

Once C-level commitment and capital are secured, the next step on the journey is to ensure that the third C is in place; relevant capabilities in the form of people, skills, processes, and technology. The first natural step is assessing your capabilities within your current organization. This is a good starting point, but from my perspective, not enough. To speed up your digital transformation agenda, external (outside-in) perspectives are needed. A rapid and good way of doing this is to work with start-ups. This can be particularly true for filling up sustainability capabilities – most companies in traditional sectors may not have sustainability teams and expertise, or at least not large enough to work out innovative solutions. Start-ups can bring this to the business. The start-up community is very fast-moving and offers specific solutions for specific challenges or opportunities you might have. Remember, it starts with your business transformation plan, and the technology will follow.

The last two Cs focus on soft factors needed to succeed with your sustainable digital transformation agenda. Never underestimate the power of the people in your organization. There is tremendous knowledge and understanding of what works well and what does not. This is a great asset to engage the entire organization in open innovation. To make this happen, a culture of innovation needs to be instilled, where people’s ideas matter and are given the possibility to be developed and tested. Allowing failure and securing learnings are vital to ensuring people are willing and daring to share their innovative thoughts. On top of this, time needs to be allocated for innovation in the company. It is as fundamental as capital allocation; well, time is money…

Once the innovation pipeline is developed, and new digital solutions are available to accelerate your company’s transformation, they need to be scaled up. When getting to this stage, change management is the critical activity to pay attention to. It is essential that the C-level actively supports scaling up ideas with a “cross-organizational mindset” – that is, an idea born in one part of the company might be equally relevant for another part. This is one of the most challenging areas regarding sustainability. Changing the mindset of a sufficiently large number of employees to embed sustainability by design in every level and function of the organization takes time, education, commitment, and resources. However, siloed organizations typically do not excel in sharing ideas and talking between the silos. Many companies have a “not invented here” syndrome that must be removed to pave the way for successful and valuable scale-up with a “cross-organizational mindset.”

The digital transformation agenda is nothing that should be hidden within an IT and Digitalization (CIO) organization. It is an agenda that must be communicated by the CEO and understood by the entire company from the perspective of driving business value and transformation. An IT and Digitalization Organization (CIO) can be the custodian and driver of the digital transformation agenda, but it must be owned and acknowledged by the core business. In the case of sustainability, however, many companies find that this change is happening the other way around, from the bottom up, with employees and other stakeholders demanding that change in leadership mindset.

Driving digital transformation is not easy. However, having the 5Cs in place gives us an excellent foundation for successful and measurable business results:

Figure 12.1 – The 5Cs for success

Figure 12.1 – The 5Cs for success

Bringing everything together

As human beings, we are wired to respond positively to instant gratification and accomplishments. Dopamine is a feel-good neurotransmitter; the brain releases it when we accomplish something. On your journey to transforming IT into a sustainable enterprise, it is important to set short-term goals, 6 to 12 months along the journey, and deliver progress quickly to build momentum and awareness within the organization but also for yourself and your team for those dopamine kicks that occur when you have accomplished something. Introducing new sustainable alternatives that make it easier for users to make sustainable choices is a great way to build positive momentum throughout the organization.

As we approach this book’s end, let us revisit the chapters and their recommendations.

Chapter 1, Our Most Significant Challenge Ahead, went into the basics of climate change and the breadth and depth that digitalization and hyperconnectivity have on society.

Chapter 2, Rise of Sustainable IT, focused on the main drivers of a sustainable IT agenda and its importance in implementing sustainable IT into the overall corporate sustainability agenda. We looked at some examples of IT’s impact on the environment where 1% to 2% of the world’s energy is consumed by data centers, the number of devices is expected to reach 55.7 billion in 2025, and the fact that 57 million tons of e-waste were generated worldwide in 2021, making it the most significant waste stream in the world. We looked at the definition of sustainable IT and examples to differentiate between sustainability in IT, sustainability by IT, and IT for society. To put everything into context, we introduced the sustainable IT reference model to enable you to understand how the different building blocks fit together:

Figure 12.2 – Sustainable IT reference model

Figure 12.2 – Sustainable IT reference model

All the key concepts illustrated in Figure 12.2 related to sustainability have been covered throughout this book. Finally, we looked at drivers for a sustainable IT agenda and ESG considerations for IT, such as financial value, non-financial value, risks, employees, and readiness.

Chapter 3, The Fundamental Building Blocks of a Sustainable IT Practice, provided a brief introduction to Part 2 of this book and an overview of Chapter 4, Data Center and Cloud, to Chapter 9, Sustainability by IT. This chapter highlighted several key concepts, methods, and tools that were covered in more detail in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4, Data Center and Cloud, introduced you to the digital infrastructure within the data center and cloud realm, its benefits, and what sustainable IT benefits it can bring. We explored different considerations to transition data center estates to sustainable digital infrastructure. With data centers and the cloud representing the information backbone in our increasingly digitized world, it also represents a more significant part of the world’s emissions. Today, data centers and the cloud represent 1% to 2% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, which is on par with the global aviation industry and is expected to rise sharply. Therefore, we must ensure that we build sustainable digital infrastructure as we advance. Let us look at how we can build sustainable digital infrastructure.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 4, Data Center and Cloud:

  • Select data center operations and facilities that have demonstrable sustainability practices where practical.
  • Review your entire application estate and consider removing redundant and duplicate applications. We explored this further in Chapter 5, Application and Data.
  • Start shifting out resource-intensive and inefficient legacy applications in your application portfolio to enterprise cloud solutions that can power your ERP, CRM, SCM, and eCommerce.
  • Utilize or shift to providers utilizing low carbon grids.
  • Utilize or shift to energy-efficient equipment (servers, network equipment, and so on) and architecture in your data center operations.
  • Monitor energy consumption down to the rack level.
  • Move workflows across cloud regions, depending on renewable energy consumption.
  • Minimize data amounts wherever possible
  • Use artificial intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning ML to optimize data center utilization and improve cooling solutions.
  • Consider the possibility of being able to recover surplus heat and water and provide feedback to a local district heating and cooling provider to create a favorable net ecosystem.

Chapter 5, Application and Data, examined how we can optimize an entire application portfolio to a single application to run more sustainably, impacting energy consumption, resource consumption, and utilization to result in emitting less carbon. Our increasingly digitized world runs on software; how these solutions operate can significantly impact the environment regarding energy consumption and carbon emissions. This chapter is rich in content and covers two essential topics that can significantly impact the short and long term. There are many ways to approach how to optimize your application portfolio or a single application. It is essential to start understanding where your efforts will have the most significant impact on taking the necessary steps to reduce your carbon emissions from the software.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 5, Application and Data:

  • Energy efficiency:
    • Start shifting out resource intense and inefficient legacy applications in your application portfolio to enterprise cloud solutions that can power your ERP, CRM, SCM, and e-commerce.
    • Monitor energy consumption down to the application level. Use the least amount of energy possible.
    • Utilize or shift to energy-efficient application architectures such as serverless computing or Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS).
    • Minimize data amounts and multiple data stores wherever possible.
  • Hardware efficiency:
    • Choose hardware wisely. Use the least embodied carbon possible.
  • Carbon awareness:
    • Utilize or shift your application portfolio to providers while utilizing low carbon grids
    • Explore time, location, and vendor-based demand shaping
    • Move workflows across cloud regions, depending on low-carbon availability

Chapter 6, IT Hardware Management, introduced how you can reimagine your approach to managing your IT hardware to positively impact social and environmental aspects and reduce costs. IT hardware from servers, network equipment, computers, monitors, tablets, and smartphones that an enterprise or organization uses significantly impacts your Scope 2 (energy consumption) and Scope 3 (material use) GHG emissions throughout the whole life cycle, especially during production and disposal. The extraction of raw materials, such as rare earth metals and other materials needed in the manufacturing process when creating this equipment, can result in loss of biodiversity, depletion of finite resources, and generates enormous volumes of toxic waste. It also involves generating social inequalities related to using forced labor in some countries to obtain such rare metals.

Unfortunately, the IT hardware life cycle process tends to be linear rather than circular. Applying a circular approach to managing IT hardware is an excellent unlock toward carbon neutrality by focusing on extending product lifetime and recirculating all materials without producing any waste. In this chapter, we explored different ways to reduce the impact of our IT hardware.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 6, IT Hardware Management:

  • Procure hardware with a minimum life cycle carbon cost, socially responsible supply chain, and sustainably sourced raw materials.
  • Explore opportunities to buy refurbished IT equipment to save on carbon costs.
  • Demand Energy Star, EPEAT, and TCO Certified labeled IT hardware to reduce both operational cost and carbon emissions.
  • Leverage both social and environmental requirements from, for example, TCO Certified or EPEAT in your RFIs, RFPs, Master Service Agreements (MSAs), contracts, and supplier code of conduct.
  • Extend the possibility to extend the IT hardware lifecycle policy to 4, 5, or even 6 years.
  • Explore the IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) industry, which can enable circularity through reuse, refurbishment, and remarketing.
  • Auto switch-off hardware when it’s not in use to preserve energy.
  • Understand the share of renewable energy in your office locations. We explored this further in Chapter 7, Energy Resource Management.
  • Explore Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) to save on IT hardware and transfer the workload from client-side to server-side.
  • Engage your employees by raising awareness of device carbon footprint and enabling them to make conscious, sustainable choices to reduce carbon costs.
  • Introduce refurbished IT hardware such as computers, laptops, and smartphones for ordering into your IT Service Catalog.

Chapter 7, Energy Resource Management, focused on the energy consumption from IT assets and primarily end user IT equipment. Managing your energy more effectively can significantly impact industrial competitiveness, energy cost structure, and Scope 2 GHG emissions.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 7, Energy Resource Management:

  • Buy resource-efficient hardware
  • Educate users on energy leakage and encourage them to turn off IT hardware when it’s not in use
  • Leverage renewable energy sources
  • Take advantage of various system power management settings
  • Go virtual by exploring VDI and DaaS to save on IT hardware and improve energy efficiency
  • Explore smart energy technologies

Remember, the greenest and cheapest energy is the energy we do not use.

Chapter 8, Leveraging Your Buying Power, introduced you to the different facets of sustainable IT vendor management and procurement. The IT supply chain is very complex, and as a buyer, you must act strategically, mitigate risk, and promote sustainability to make your supply chain more trustworthy and transparent. By leveraging your buying power, you can influence your supply chain of IT vendors to address environmental and social issues and do so openly and consistently.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 8, Leveraging Your Buying Power:

  • Make your purpose and intentions clear with your vendors. Find common ground with your vendors to make a joint ESG impact.
  • Choose vendors that are members of the Responsible Business Alliance or similar alliances.
  • Update your code of conduct with impactful ESG criteria and ensure your vendors subscribe to it.
  • Leverage existing sustainability certifications from EPEAT, TCO Certified, and Energy Star and burden the vendor to provide proof of compliance.
  • Buy eco-labeled equipment.
  • Include take-back clauses in agreements.
  • Demand disclosure of GHG emissions from not only the vendor itself but from its product and services that can be included in your Scope 3 reporting.
  • Leverage your buying power to manage our vendor ecosystem, and acquire and divest vendors based on their performance as needed.

Chapter 9, Sustainability by IT, explored to a large extent how IT can help reduce environmental burdens elsewhere in society by using innovation for sustainable business models. Technology, be it CleanTech or SustainTech, has an incredible opportunity to be an enabler in developing sustainable technology. Moving from ownership to usership unlocks several sustainable circular opportunities in various industries. Sustainability by IT is a vast topic that covers a broad spectrum, and it could easily be a book by itself, but this chapter provided a broad overview of this topic.

The following are the key recommendations from Chapter 9, Sustainability by IT:

  • Explore exponential technologies such as AI, ML, cloud, quantum computing, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), drones, and XR technologies to create new and improved sustainable, innovative solutions.
  • Leverage circular economy principles to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature.
  • Explore different subscription business models to move from ownership to usership.
  • Examine different ways to propel innovation forward, such as hackathons.
  • Establish a formalized process for taking innovative ideas from conceptual design to full-blown scalable solutions. We explored this concept earlier in this chapter with Teemu Salmi’s 5Cs to secure successful digital transformation.

Chapter 10, Get Started Today, marked the first chapter in Part 3 of this book, where we focused on applying what we learned from Part 2. There were three objectives within this chapter: create a current and target state sustainable IT maturity assessment, establish a current state’s GHG/carbon emission baseline, and identify actionable areas to establish your GHG/carbon emission target state.

The sustainable IT maturity model©, as illustrated in Figure 12.3, is not an exact science. Still, it should be used as a model to assess your starting point and to decide your direction of travel toward your target state. Suppose you are a large corporation with several divisions or business areas. In that case, it might also make sense to conduct the maturity assessment per division or business area since the maturity might differ tremendously, depending on their lines of business:

Figure 12.3 – Sustainable IT maturity model©

Figure 12.3 – Sustainable IT maturity model©

To conduct your emission calculation, we must follow a seven-step process, as illustrated in Figure 12.4.

Figure 12.4 – Emission calculation – the seven-step process

Figure 12.4 – Emission calculation – the seven-step process

This process gives us a GHG/carbon emission baseline and a simulation of the target state. The model is based on several parameters and assumptions. Your results will differ, depending on your business environment. The objective is not to give you an exact figure for your baseline but to illustrate your action areas toward net zero. Although I have yet to find anything commercially available on the market to take a holistic view to encompass all aspects of your IT environment and calculate your total emissions within IT. I am sure it won’t take long before we see these types of products and solutions surface in the marketplace. Your sustainable IT maturity assessment and your current and target state GHG/carbon emission are integral inputs to the sustainable IT strategy framework covered in the subsequent chapter.

Chapter 11, Putting a Sustainable IT Strategy in Place, went into detail about how you can create a sustainable IT strategy and roadmap. This sustainable IT strategy framework is illustrated in Figure 12.5:

Figure 12.5 – Sustainable IT strategy framework

Figure 12.5 – Sustainable IT strategy framework

Starting with your input into the strategic planning process, we assessed external environmental factors such as market trends, risks, social pressure, and legal and compliance requirements and internal environmental factors such as business environment, materiality assessment, enterprise sustainability goals, priorities, and strategy. Through our sustainable IT maturity assessment and current and target state GHG/carbon emissions, we leveraged these inputs to formulate our sustainable IT value proposition and outline our why, what, and how within our sustainable IT strategy. By following the sustainable IT strategic planning process methodically, we created a sustainable IT strategy on a page, as illustrated in Figure 12.6:

Figure 12.6 – Sustainable IT strategy on-a-page

Figure 12.6 – Sustainable IT strategy on-a-page

Furthermore, we exemplified our direction of travel by breaking our strategy into three roadmaps for each workstream – sustainability in IT, sustainability by IT, and IT for society – with examples for each key focus area.

The hardest part is not formulating a sustainable IT strategy by outlining why, what, and how. It is to identify who and when – who will execute the initiatives, and when will we execute them? Taking a strategy to execution is the most challenging part: operationalizing your strategy, delivering results quickly, and staying the course.

In this final chapter, I tried to outline the most essential step to ensure your strategy takes flight. This chapter discussed the importance of courageous sustainable leadership, uniting sustainability and technology to deliver business value, and the 5Cs for successful digital transformation.

Summary

By now, I am sure you have realized that sustainable IT is no quick fix, and it will take time to transition to a sustainable IT enterprise. Taking a strategy to execution is the most challenging part of operationalizing your strategy by delivering results quickly and staying the course to make a long-term sustainable impact. We are in a decade of climate action where we must collectively halve our carbon emissions by 2030. If you have made it this far in this book, I hope that I have provided you with a set of tools to get started and that you feel educated, empowered, and inspired to get started.

Every journey will look different, depending on your industry and your company’s environment. You must focus on the key areas that will make the most significant long-term sustainable impact within your business environment. Stay on top of emerging technologies and trends to be able to correct the course when needed.

Take data-driven decisions based on your GHG/carbon emission baseline and sustainable IT maturity. Where does it make sense to start? Where can you make the most long-term sustainable impact? For example, if you have 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 running in data centers with high carbon intensity, I recommend migrating them to low-carbon alternatives over reducing paper in printing. If you have a large estate of IT assets, such as notebooks and smartphones, focus on how you can prolong the longevity of your assets by 1 to 2 years and ensure that you can get a second life at your end-of-use through proper ITAD. These two examples will give you quick wins and help you start building momentum within the organization.

Make sure you continuously communicate your progress with your team, the entire organization, and outside stakeholders, as this will help others identify best practices that can move the entire industry forward. Be open and transparent about your progress. Sustainability is everyone’s job, and the more we communicate and build awareness throughout the organization, the more they will feel inspired and activate themselves on the journey.

In the end, it all starts with people – people that are willing to make a change, act as the catalyst of change, and be at the heart of the sustainability transformation. People like you and me.

Good luck with building your sustainable IT enterprise!

Bibliography

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