OVUM評論：CEOs’ pro-sustainability views are an open invitation to the IT industry

Survey results indicate a substantial shift in opinions about sustainability

Accenture surveyed 766 CEOs worldwide on behalf of the UN Global Compact, an initiative launched in 2000 to encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies.

A huge majority of the CEOs – 93% – agreed that sustainable practices will be key to their future success. Contrary to conventional wisdom, 80% said the global recession has made sustainable practices more important, not less, in part because of the correlation between sustainable practices, efficiency, and cost savings. More than 90% said their companies would adopt new technologies during the next five years to enable more sustainable practices. Furthermore, the share of CEOs who said sustainability has become part of their company’s strategy and operations rose from 50% in a similar survey in 2007 to 81% in the one just completed.

The CEOs also identified some key challenges to making further gains, including the complexity of implementing sustainable practices across business functions; competing strategic priorities; and lack of recognition from the financial markets. And they identified several areas where businesses must focus more attention, including shifting consumer tastes in favor of sustainable products; training management and employees to deal with sustainability issues; communicating to investors the importance of sustainable practices; working with governments toward clearer, fairer regulations; and measuring sustainability performance.

Shifting attitudes amount to an open invitation for IT solution providers

The survey’s overall results, the challenges the CEOs cited, and the actions they recommend all support our view that IT solution providers, especially enterprise software vendors and systems integrators, have a critical role to play in fostering more sustainable practices.

The key reason is the one the CEOs stated – the direct relationship between sustainability and efficiency – and its unstated corollary, that increasing efficiency reduces costs and the savings carry straight to the bottom line.

Some efficiency gains can be achieved by measures so simple that they don’t require any new investment in IT. Additional gains can be made through well-established, if not universally implemented, “green IT” techniques for reducing the amount of electrical power for a given computing workload, whether in a data center or in a desktop or laptop machine.

But many efficiency measures, whether internal or across a company’s supply and distribution chains, require the kind of visibility, analytics, and control over business processes that only solutions such as enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, and performance optimization can provide.

This fact, together with the CEOs’ overwhelming belief that broad-based sustainability measures will be critical to their future success, suggests the emergence of a huge new market as application vendors start adding sustainability modules to their solutions and as integrators take up the challenge of capturing and managing the huge volumes of data these solutions will generate.

Survey results also address a critical question: how to sell sustainability

A key challenge that vendors have faced in selling sustainability solutions has been a lack of clear targets. In theory, every C-level executive should have at least some interest in sustainability solutions – CFOs to save money, legal officers to ease compliance and reporting, marketing officers to enhance the company’s image. CIOs, who already manage the core applications that will be the backbone of sustainability solutions, have a tremendous opportunity to add new strategic value.

The reality in most companies is that no one in the C-suite has claimed or been designated as “owner” of the sustainability challenge. Everyone at the big conference table can simply shrug and say, “Not my job.”

We suspect that is about to change. If 93% of corporate CEOs believe their future success hinges on effective sustainability management, the next step for many will be to name a senior executive to do the job. At that point, IT solution providers will know precisely whom to approach and say, “Here’s what we can do for you.”