A comprehensive environmental, social, and governance (ESG) analytics strategy demonstrates to business stakeholders, investors, and customers that you take your role in the world — and the responsibilities that brings — seriously.
Investors are increasingly factoring ESG into their investment decision-making process and consumers are paying attention to ESG action among their favorite brands.
Combine that with growing regulatory pressures from governments and industry bodies that can result in millions of dollars in fines and reputational damage (as Goldman Sachs discovered), leaders should be laser-focused on making their ESG strategies a success.
The three pillars of ESG cover a huge range of concerns, from an organization’s environmental footprint to the measures it takes to avoid corruption. These guidelines are encouraging leaders to think critically about how they run their business, the suppliers and partners they choose, and where and how they trade. But because the issues covered by ESG are so wide-ranging, many organizations struggle to manage the large workload, complex reporting processes, and level of visibility required for their ESG initiatives.
Inefficient data processes are complicating ESG
In our new eBook, “Accelerate Your ESG Impact with Automated Analytics”, we’ve broken down the increasingly complex ESG landscape into its core components: what ESG means, why it’s so important, and where the most common reporting challenges lie.
Many of the challenges that hamper ESG initiatives are the same as the barriers that prevent organizations from maximizing innovation in their products, services, supply chain, long-term planning, and other initiatives that rely on advanced data practices.
For example, legacy infrastructure and tools run through organizations in every industry, trapping data in silos and severely limiting the level of detail teams can achieve through analysis. Analysts need to manually pull, combine, and assess data from disparate systems to try and build a full picture, putting the whole process at risk of errors and using up hours of valuable time. For ESG, overcoming this lack of visibility and potential for mistakes can be the difference between delivering a trusted report and managing the aftermath of inaccurate disclosures. Challenges in assimilating a wider array of data from internal and external source with speed, reliability and repeatability can limit uncovering critical analytical insights to achieve ESG targets.
Advanced analytics automation will revolutionize ESG
There are unsurprisingly a wider spectrum of challenges that need to be addressed to improve organizational maturity across ESG – for example, gaining assurance on materiality assessments, transitioning the culture to consider financial returns and ESG impact collectively, and building multi-disciplinary teams that become advocates for sustainability.
Few would question the importance of advancing data and analytics automation across the ESG landscape, where flexibility needs to be maintained in light converging standards and more scrutiny on ESG targets. To meet their evolving ESG obligations — and use data and resources in a more savvy way — organizations need to adapt their analytics processes, embracing automation and unifying data from every available source.
“Accelerate Your ESG Impact With Automated Analytics” highlights the data, reporting, and analytics challenges faced by many organizations embarking on their ESG journey and provides insights around key characteristics of viable platform solutions.
Every organization will be at a different stage in their ESG strategy. In some sectors, leaders will have been monitoring their carbon emissions or community welfare impact for decades, while others are just getting started.
Finding the balance between maintaining control, being flexible to accommodate for new requirements while managing costs can a daunting prospect. It is therefore practical to simplify data and analytics processes through low-code and automated solutions that:
- Improve data visibility and traceability across the value chain, combining multiple data types and sources;
- Are technology agnostic and highly inter-operable with multiple data formats, and different use cases across departments;
- Empower everyone in the organization to augment their analytical skills, drive collaboration and unlock ESG insights.
If you’re considering transforming your own ESG reporting and analytics processes, then finding the appropriate solutions align people, process and data that suit your organization is critical. “Accelerate Your ESG Impact With Automated Analytics” digs deeper into the challenges and recommended approaches across each key ESG area, from reconciling disclosures to assessing product and investment sustainability.
Read the eBook now to explore how analytics automation could factor into your ESG processes, reducing risk, attracting investment, optimizing operations, and boosting the sustainability outlook for your organization.