Report Shows Companies Are Using IT to Support CSR Initiatives

March 30th, 2007

Twenty years ago, corporate social responsibility (CSR) consisted of donating money to good causes, adopting schools, or providing scholarships for the children of employees. However, with the rise of sustainability as a corporate issue, CSR has gravitated to the big stage where its performance is followed by investors. Now CSR has a different meaning — what impact does the existence of your company have on the world around you and what are you doing to assure sustainability of both the planet and the enterprise?

A new report by AMR Research points out that the United States is well ahead of Europe in integrating corporate social responsibility from IT data into the larger organizational framework for making decisions. However, even in America, most of the data on corporate social responsibility is being collected by ERP systems that can be reactive, but don’t have the capacity to be proactive.

According to AMR’s survey of 150 businesses, within the next two years, 89 percent of companies in the United States and 62 percent in Europe plan to use technology to manage their corporate social responsibility initiatives. My guess is that they will employ proactive tools to handle this properly.

Close to 70 percent of companies have a dedicated budget for CSR initiatives, with 48 percent of companies having a dedicated budget for environmental initiatives. In Europe environmental concerns take precedence over other forms of corporate social responsibility.

The report listed some interesting reasons why businesses are tackling these issues (and they are not just regulatory anymore). The biggest among them is customer loyalty, which means their customers want to do business with socially responsible companies. So CSR is another “feature” of their product offerings. Boards are pushing businesses in the direction of greater responsibility, and so are employees. Unlike the past, when CSR was considered just a “feel good” initiative, now it is seen as a competitive advantage and even a moral imperative.

Corporate executives are looking for a dashboard that shows their CSR initiatives along with the rest of their governance issues, so they can stay on top of this quickly-growing concern.

Tags: corporate social responsibility csr sustainability

Entry Filed under: Corporate Responsibility