Guest post: How to measure corporate sustainability initiatives

According to a survey in the MIT Sloan Management Review, two-out-of-three executives see sustainability as a necessary component of business today and 70 percent note that sustainability is now a permanent goal on their corporate agendas.  The increased importance of energy reduction and process efficiency means that sustainability teams will need to be more accountable and fiscally-responsible. To do so, they must have a better grasp of their sustainability initiatives and their effects: the goals associated with sustainability must be accountable and well-defined.

However, all goals aren’t created equally, according to David Schatsky. “Aggressive goals are more powerful than modest goals,” he says. “Public goals have greater impact than internal goals. Quantitative goals are more credible than non-quantitative goals. And goals for the future send a signal that goals described in retrospect do not.” Knowing the current state of an organization’s efficiency is important in knowing where it can go, and how it can get there.

To enhance sustainability initiatives (and their effectiveness), I believe businesses must do the following:

1. Improve data accuracy by automating collection and integrating the organizations’ various enterprise systems into a centralized database.
2. Utilize Business Intelligence (BI) tools to find trends, make better-informed decisions and present information in an easily digestible format to executives.
3. Develop sustainability teams that are data-minded and accountable for their actions to maximize the impact on all components of the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit).

Head over to SoftwareAdvice.com to read more on software options available for making sustainability initiatives more accountable.

Guest post by Michael Koploy, ERP Analyst

Picture credit: photologue_np, Flickr, creative commons

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