Environmental social and governance issues, as well as sustainability are two of the most high-profile metrics that organisations are focused on in recent years.
As with any initiative that requires considerable effort and resources, metrics for tracking and reporting on these initiatives have become important to ensure the initiatives themselves are creating and delivering the promised value.
The IDC 2022 Global Sustainability Software Buyer Value Survey revealed that social sustainability topics account for the largest share of use cases for sustainability software despite the visibility accorded to environmental issues.
These human and social capital uses include diversity, equity and inclusion, employee health and safety, data privacy, human rights, and product access and affordability.
The need for tracking and reporting solutions
Sustainability software solutions are designed to help organisations track and report their ESG performance and provide relevant data to improve their operational performance.
This requires software providers to think about ESG use cases holistically, especially in the context of complex issue areas such as employee health and wellbeing, decarbonization, and sustainable supply chain management.
And given that improving operating costs and fulfilling executive mandates are among the top investment drivers for sustainability software, the software needs to help organisations actively manage their sustainability performance, instead of simply "checking off boxes" for ESG reporting.
"Environmental issues like decarbonization have traditionally topped the list as sustainability priorities for many organisations. However, over the past few years, the impact that the pandemic has had on the workforce has raised the level of emphasis by organisations on social sustainability issues such as employee health, safety, and wellbeing”, said Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead for sustainable strategies and technologies at IDC.
"Software vendors play a critical role in helping organisations operationalize ESG and move from target setting and strategizing to creating measurable impact in regard to their most material ESG issues."
Bjoern Stengel
Other key findings:
Addressing social sustainability issues related to human capital management is amongst the top business value benefits that organisations expect to achieve by utilizing sustainability software solutions.
Sustainability/ESG software plays an important role across all use cases related to internal operations, highlighting the need for comprehensive solutions that capture information across different issue areas.
IT plays a bigger role in enabling organisations to track their ESG performance for reporting purposes and driving desired business outcomes. The blend of responsible IT and line of business functions require software vendors to successfully convey their value proposition to both buyer groups.
