Published on the 14/09/2022 | Written by Heather Wright
And the ‘two for one’ deals bringing financial wins…
Local companies are turning to big data and analytics, as well as other technologies including AI and cloud, as sustainability moves increasingly into the CIOs’ wheelhouse.
Sustainability issues, including carbon emissions, have been an increasing priority for the C-suite with environmental sustainability making it into the top 10 business priorities for CEOs for the first time this year, according to a Gartner report. It ranked eighth this year – up from 14th in 2019 and 20th in 2015.
“You can beat the moment and make a difference when it comes to energy usage.”
And those CEOs are are turning to tech leaders to help provide the solutions in both reducing carbon footprints and in the reporting of metrics.
IDC says sustainability initiatives have helped push big data and analytics adoption across Australia and New Zealand to a net spend of US$5.5 billion this year, with a compound annual growth rate of 13.3 percent expected in the five years out to 2026.
Abhik Sarkar, IDC Asia Pacific IT spending guides market analyst, says meeting sustainability metrics and KPIs will drive big data and analytics adoption in enterprises.
“Identifying, tracking and measuring ESG obstacles will be technology buyers’ primary goal as this will have major impact on their operational, financial and reputational impact, as a transparent and robust benchmarking process will build a stronger tech partner ecosystem.
IDC says sustainability is evolving as an essential and frequently discussed topic across local enterprises as sustainability credentials are part of evaluation processes in many organisations.
When it comes to making a difference, cloud has long been championed.
A 2020 report from from Accenture Strategy and UNGC claimed migration to the public cloud could achieve a 5.9 percent decrease in total IT emissions – or nearly 60 million tons of CO2 globally a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 22 million cars off the road.
The reduction comes through a range of factors, including power, cooling and hardware efficiency, compute utilisation, sustainable software engineering and cloud-native application architecture.
At this week’s Gartner IT Symposium on the Gold Coast, attendees were told cloud technology can help reduce up to 90 percent of green house gas emissions from traditional on-premise data centres.
But they were also warned that it’s not a given, and while the cloud vendor is responsible for making the cloud sustainable, it’s up to the customer to ensure its used sustainably. Attendees were urged to ask for specific data around renewables, GHG and circularity and to favour providers with certified emissions reduction targets.
AI is also being harnessed in sustainability initiatives. Accenture’s 2022 sustainable tech survey found that 70 percent of the companies which had successfully reduced emissions in production and operations had used AI to do so, just ahead of cloud, used by 69 percent.
IoT (55 percent), data and analytics (51 percent) and blockchain (47 percent) were also cited by companies.
Individual industries and companies are also finding different ways to address the issue.
Aerospace manufacturing giant Boeing developed a data modelling tool, Cascade, which it hopes will enable the industry to visualise the real climate impact of each solution to inform the best strategies toward achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
Gartner has flagged advanced grid management software, carbon footprint measurement and cloud sustainability as three emerging environmental sustainability technologies which it believes will see early mainstream adoption by 2025.
“The transition to a net-zero economy will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution of the digital revolution, requiring new technologies, business models, strategies and processes,” Annette Zimmermann, Gartner research vice president, says.
The analyst firm expects carbon footprint measurement technologies to see ‘significant’ adoption as organisations broaden their focus to cover all emission types – ranging from scope one direct emissions from owned or controlled sources to scope three indirect emissions in the value chain, both up and downstream – and increased reporting transparency.
That expected growth of carbon footprint measurement technologies will be supported by the proliferation of IoT-enabled environmental sensors.
“Ultimately every organisation will have to invest in carbon accounting tools,” Zimmermann says. “Software solutions which provide transparent carbon measurement and actionable advice are seeing rapid adoption and Gartner expects continued growth as integration capabilities progress.”
Advanced grid management, which comprises Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition), utility energy management systems and new operationalised real-time capabilities that leverage physical and machine learning models are also on the up for electricity system operators themselves.
Two for one: Sustainability + returns
And if you’re thinking it all means extra cost and headaches for little business return, it’s not all bad news.
Adrian Leow, Gartner VP analyst, says responsible investment in technology can be a ‘two for one’ strategy to achieve sustainable growth and returns.
“Responsible investment in digital technologies delivers both financial and sustainability outcomes – and by sustainability we mean ESG (environmental, social and governance).
“Use digital technology and data to deliver financial and sustainability outcomes for your organisation.”
He cited the example of investing in AI for route optimisation – cutting emissions and saving on costs.
He says intelligent connected infrastructure – the combination of AI, IoT, cloud, analytics and edge computing, integrated in a mesh fabric to enable the infrastructure to share data – can provide an emerging revenue and growth opportunity for business.
Bike sharing organisation Lyft has introduced a bike ‘angels’ program, enabling people to gain credits for riding bikes back to docking stations which needs bikes, driving new business opportunities.
Also in the ‘two for one’ force multiplier category espoused by Leow is digitally reducing energy usage by putting IT systems on an energy diet.
“Natural gas prices are 10 times higher than they’ve been over the last decade. Energy used to be buried in procurement, but it has quickly become a boardroom issue,” he says.
“You can beat the moment and make a difference when it comes to energy usage.”
Optimising compute and storage utilisation and including energy efficiency in architecture, vendor, capacity and operations choices will cut costs both IT systems and your organisation, while also bringing sustainability benefits.
CIOs can also engineer autonomous sourcing, using AI, ML and NLP to increase event automation and provide better decision support to vet and optimise large supply bases.
“Inflation, access to talent and raw materials are the top three business disruptions identified by executives in a recent Gartner survey,” Leow says.
While CIOs might feel there’s little they can do to deal with those disruptions, Leow argues otherwise.
“Emerging technology for autonomous sourcing can mitigate all of these business disruptions and more. Engineer autonomous sourcing is a force multiplier because it increases efficiency and speed and improves suppliers’ sustainability,” he says.
“As a CIO you can use responsible investment in digital technologies to drive two-for-ones – investments that create financial and sustainability outcomes.”
