Central to the success of any environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitment is data. Any organisation that chooses to commit itself to an ESG initiative must be able to measure change and accelerate transformation in areas such as emissions, governance and diversity, equity and inclusion, organisations need access to data from outside the organisation.
Gartner says chief information officers (CIOs) should be prepared to inject data and insight that will help the enterprise improve access to capital, cost of capital, operating costs and ultimately stock performance.
EY agrees and concludes that CIOs play critical roles in enabling ESG-related programs across their enterprises.
Linus Tham, group chief information officer for IHH Healthcare, acknowledges the importance of data in ensuring that ESG commitments are adhered to.
“Fundamental to healthcare is trust. If you lose the trust of the community, and your patients, you are gone (as a business). One of our ESG goals (at IHH) for the patient is around accessibility and transparency of what we do, how we do it, and what we offer to patients. We embrace value-driven outcomes significantly.”
Linus Tham
He stressed that part of IHH’s ESG journey is earning the trust of its patients through the protection of the privacy of their data.
For IT, it is important to look at what is being measured. “How do we measure the information? What is available out there, and how are we going to be benchmarking our performance?”
He also pointed out that part of the goal of the benchmarking effort is not only to gauge where the organisation is vis-à-vis its goals but to learn from other companies’ best practices as well.
“As CIO, that is the area in terms of getting access to external performance data around ESG as well as finding the right measurements internally,” said Tham.
He acknowledged that as an organisation they are still discovering and learning as they move along the ESG journey.
Expectations of the CIO
Asked what is expected of the CIO as it relates to IHH’s ESG aspirations, Tham said that around ESG, IHH has identified four areas of focus: patients, people, public and planet, and each of the functions has an area of responsibility.
“The role of the CIO is to support the needs of all the other functions in terms of how they gather, capture and measure the data,” noted Tham. As group CIO, Tham stressed the importance of communicating this to the country (or market) teams, so they understand the goals and directions and work directly with their respective functions.
As a function, IT is also doing its part to support the overall ESG initiatives, including how it sources products and services from vendors.
“We are choosing more sustainable vendors in terms of how they fill the supply chain with equipment for us and, and how they collect back the equipment and recycle or dispose of them properly,” he added.
ESG accountability
In discussions with business, finance and technology leaders in the region, it is clear that ESG is either led by the Chief Sustainability Officer or the Chief Finance Officer. However, as technology is a central tenet of making sure initiatives are managed, tracked, analysed, verified and measured, the CIO needs to be kept in the loop at all times in the ESG journey.
Tham points out that ESG is a collective initiative, implying that success is collective as well.
That said, he acknowledged the significant amount of data that is generated today by the business. ESG requires the CIO to relook at how the organisation’s digitalisation processes and take out unnecessary waste.
“If we do not design good IT systems, you will find there are a lot of manual workarounds (created to compensate for the bad design) which may create unnecessary hindrances,” he cautioned.
With the consumerisation of technology, Tham says patients expect to interact with IHH (and the healthcare provider in general) more digitally. He says these forces providers to design sustainable points of interaction.
Similarly, Tham points out that healthcare resources are expensive, and as such it is incumbent upon the healthcare provider, like IHH, to create systems and processes that allow for the optimal use of these resources. This could be through things like booking systems with built-in reminders (for patients and staff).
“I see increasingly on the one hand, with all this digitalisation, visual transformation, it becomes a lot more key to ensuring that healthcare as a whole is more sustainable,” he continued.
ESG-related challenges facing the CIO
Like any complex, enterprise-wide initiative, ESG is a complex undertaking from strategy to execution. Strategy development is hard because of the sheer number of factors to be considered. Operationalising ESG across the organisation is even harder.
For Tham, mindset is the biggest challenge of all. “To hold true to why are we around. It must be tied to the purpose. How do we make sure we bring the whole organisation along and encourage them to see things, keeping true to the overall goal, and doing things that support the overall goal,” he added.
“Which is why we take pains to define what are we trying to do. What are the pillars we are focusing on, such as trust and synergy, what do we have (now), and what are the engines that we're gonna build to deliver that?”
Linus Tham
He reckoned that requiring suppliers to have ESG initiatives and to adhere to these is easy. “Getting the whole organisation to believe (in ESG) and to connect it t our end goal, that I think is one of our biggest challenges,” conceded Tham.
It is understandable where Tham is coming from. IHH Healthcare is one of the world’s largest healthcare networks, with 82 hospitals in 10 countries. Brands like Acibadem, Mount Elizabeth, Prince Court, Gleneagles, Fortis, Pantai, Parkway and International Medical University, are synonymous with excellence in healthcare.
Click on the PodChat player to hear Tham discuss in detail areas where the CIO shines in the support and execution of an organisation’s ESG strategy.
- How do you see ESG connected to information technology function?
- What is expected of the CIO when it comes to ESG?
- To what extent is the CIO accountable for ESG’s success or failure?
- What are the challenges that a CIO must overcome to ensure IT can make a positive contribution to successful ESG?
- How can CIOs get ahead on sustainability and ESG?
