Sustainability is a global issue, touching everyone in both our personal and business lives. Organizations across industries are trying to determine what they can do to reduce and eventually eliminate their carbon footprints. That includes not just minimizing carbon emissions but ultimately removing carbon from the environment as well.
How can businesses advance their sustainability efforts to meet these urgent long-term goals? Acceleration Economy analysts Bob Evans, Aaron Back, Wayne Sadin, and I join Mark Kroese, Microsoft’s General Manager of Environmental Sustainability, on January 20 in an Acceleration Economy Roundtable discussion of strategies and technologies that can help businesses measure, track, operationalize, and accelerate their sustainability initiatives.
Topics of discussion include:
- What is the connection between the language of sustainability, metrics, and automation?
- What are business leaders’ timetables for advancing these efforts?
- What role do data, AI, machine learning, and automation play in breaking down silos?
- How can new technologies integrate with existing systems for end-to-end information sharing?
Cloud Efficiencies
With well-defined strategies, and the processes and technologies to support them, organizations can potentially drive huge improvements in sustainability. For example, Microsoft estimates businesses may be able to reduce the carbon emissions of their IT operations by as much as 98% by moving on-premises systems to the cloud.
According to Kroese, the sustainability advantages of cloud services include:
- Operational efficiencies in areas such as server optimization and load balancing
- More efficient computer hardware and software algorithms
- Environmentally friendly data centers constructed with “green” steel and cement
- Solar-, wind-, and hydro-powered cloud data centers
That’s just for IT infrastructure. Companies can go wider with sustainability initiatives by taking steps in other areas, such as vehicles, fuel, commuting, recycling, building operations, supply chains, logistics, and sourcing.
Each of those things may move the needle just a little bit, but collectively they add up. “It’s a game of inches—little changes here, little changes there,” says Kroese.
Tracking End-to-End Processes
Progress hinges on the ability to measure and track sustainability drivers in all parts of the business. As the saying goes: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. For that, the business and IT teams involved need new and better tools to establish end-to-end processes that cut across organizational silos of activity.
Emerging cloud-based solutions are designed to support the kind of data sharing and collaboration that are needed. For instance, Microsoft’s Cloud for Sustainability, introduced in July, enables customers to record, report, and reduce environmental impact through automated data connections and actionable insights.
In a blog post announcing new carbon accounting tools, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Executive VP and Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff emphasized that automation is needed to drive widescale advances in sustainability: “We can’t measure anything at scale unless we automate it.”
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability supports this through data management capabilities such as a common data model, dynamic calculation service, connection catalog, and reporting, including scorecards and data visualization dashboards. The platform can also identify gaps in requirements and make recommendations for continued improvements.
More broadly, the international community needs a system of record, or “global carbon ledger,” to track collective progress around the world, says Kroese.
Related to this, many businesses have made public commitments to “net zero” sustainability initiatives, in which they strive to bring carbon emissions and reductions into balance. Here too, the ability to track and report progress is essential. “Any organizations setting net zero goals will need to track their performance against objectives,” adds Kroese.
Acceleration Economy analyst Wayne Sadin, who focuses on CEO and Board-level strategy, says transparency will be vital as customers and partners evaluate business relationships, in part, on a company’s sustainability position. “Let’s make it visible across the organization and to outsiders, regulators, government entities, trading partners, and shareholders,” says Sadin.
Industry-wide Collaboration
Sustainability is fast becoming a collaborative effort across industries such as transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction, as companies seek to staunch the carbon emissions that are often associated with climate change. For example, automobile makers have agreed to phase out production of gas-powered vehicles by 2040, and earlier than that for zero emissions fleets.
Bob Evans, the Founder of Cloud Wars and Co-Founder of Acceleration Economy, notes that Microsoft leaders have called attention to the need not just reduce carbon emissions, called offsets, but to go a step further and remove carbon from the environment.
Kroese agrees that carbon offsets are only a first step. “We cannot just reduce our way out of the problem,” he says. “We need companies to start thinking about carbon removal versus offsets.”
The path ahead requires that more organizations align on what it means to be carbon neutral, measuring performance against objectives, and establishing markets to support sustainability initiatives. Says Kroese, “It’s simple to talk about, much harder to do.”
