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Highlights
- Organizations need to measure their social and governance metrics, not just environmental metrics, to be truly sustainable.
- Adopting cloud can help them measure the effectiveness of their social and governance initiatives.
- It can help them track progress on social goals, develop more accurate predictive models, and generate insights to effectively manage social and governance aspects of ESG.
On this page
Closer look at ESG
Social and governance data need greater focus.
When it comes to environmental, social and governance (ESG) and driving the ESG agenda with data-driven actions, the focus has so far been more on the environmental aspects of sustainability. The reason lies in the lack of implementation of technology to effectively capture and monitor organizations’ social and governance initiatives for holistic sustainability.
While organizations are reporting on some social and governance aspects, they are often for compliance. A few examples include gender equality in employment, equal pay for equal work, prohibition of child labor, and safety of workers. Meanwhile, employee satisfaction, racial discrimination, biases, and things like urban, rural, and tribal welfare are being loosely measured and not adequately improved upon due to the lack of insights and benchmarking.
In this context, cloud solutions can be instrumental in enabling more accurate measurement of social and governance scores. They can help organizations track improvements, develop complex predictive models, and generate insights to effectively manage social and governance aspects of ESG. Not just that, they can help organizations meet their commitments to society and become more responsible corporate citizens.
Measure social data
Gain insights into four social priorities.
As responsible corporate citizens, many organizations have committed to building a better, more sustainable, and a more inclusive world. By leveraging cloud capabilities, organizations can seamlessly assimilate huge volumes of dynamic data and generate real-time insights to accelerate progress, or course correct if required, across four social priorities:
Employee management: Organizations can collect, analyze, and receive alerts on real-time social data. Coupled with predictive and analytics capabilities on cloud, societal discriminations—including those done to employees or by them—can be tracked. Think of biases in the quality of services based on location, ethnicity, or economic status. Cloud-based predictive and analytics solutions also allow organizations to be forewarned about possible discrimination through patterns observed in complaints or feedback. Also, advanced video analytics capabilities can monitor working standards and automatically report non-compliance.
Product or service ownership: It is important to track the health and environmental impact of products and services. Advanced analytics of data streamed from varied sources makes this possible. Cloud offers real-time analytics capabilities across different data types along with the easy provision of ready-made AI models for sentiment analysis that helps ensure ethical marketing.
Stakeholder management: Companies must ensure a partner ecosystem where all participants are committed to making a positive impact to society. Partnership ecosystems can be validated against desirable social standards with advanced capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP), video analytics, and speech analytics that are otherwise costly compute-intensive activities but can be made easily available on the cloud. Additionally, business-as-usual interactions with stakeholders can be evaluated for ethical standards and compliance using artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics on the cloud.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR): This involves carrying out various social events and campaigns that include conducting social awareness drives and providing educational and financial support for the needy. Cloud enables seamless and effective monitoring of these activities through advanced systems such as satellite feeds and video-based solutions to reach remote areas.
Monitor governance
Governance is the cornerstone that drives all the other aspects of sustainability.
Realizing this, companies today are putting a premium on robust governance, which includes both financial and operational governance:
Financial governance: Deploy real-time monitoring of all financial transactions and AI-based anomaly detection over and above the rule-based assessment. Cloud makes available ready-to-use AI models and capabilities that can be leveraged for fraud detection and possible misappropriation.
Operational governance: Enhance monitoring of operations and event-driven architecture that can address non-compliance on a real-time basis. This, thereby, allows us to take actions that might otherwise be delayed and lead to suboptimal governance and inefficiency. Cloud enables the creation of detailed dashboards with dynamic data representation capabilities along with intricate management of alerts.
Evaluate progress
Accelerate your journey to becoming truly sustainable with cloud.
Organizations need to measure the current state and identify areas for improvement in social and governance aspects. The following figure shows the key metrics that need to be monitored for effective brand building, improved budget utilization, and enhanced sensitivity toward social and governance aspects:
Figure 1: Key social and governance metrics companies should monitor for improvement
Leading cloud providers, while providing infrastructure capabilities to address social and governance concerns, are also making real-time social and governance data available. This data can help organizations improve and benchmark social and governance scores. Hence, cloud technologies with its vast offerings, on-demand computing, and advanced data processing are proving to be the right enabler for building truly sustainable organizations.
