Savvy Businesses Taking Integrated Organizational Approach to GHG

December 10th, 2007

Al Gore has received his Nobel Prize and is on his way to Bali to monitor the talks on climate change, which appear to be going well. No nation would like to be seen as the sole impediment to averting a planetary catastrophe. News of the environment is all over the media. All the focus on climate change has led to a rush of businesses to monitor greenhouse gases and lower their carbon footprint. While this is a good thing to do, in some cases organizations are taking a reactive approach that takes a narrow view of one issue while ignoring the interrelationships of GHG emissions to all other environmental issues. This has the risk of becoming a knee-jerk reaction that obscures the view of an integrated enterprise wide strategy that deals effectively with the complexity and impact of all environmental risk to the organization. GHG management is a problem that can and should be incorporated within the holistic and strategic framework of risk management that aligns the organization with their overall environmental stewardship and sustainability goals. Forward thinking businesses understand that managing these issues effectively is an integral component of their ability to achieve and maintain leadership in their given industry now and in the future.

Best of class organizations are taking an integrated organizational approach rather than taking a singular and tactical approach to GHG. An integrated systems approach will allow businesses to more effectively organize their people, processes and technology in a manner that will allow them to compete now and into the future.

We see this reflected in our own business. Our customers are not only interested in their carbon footprint, they’re interested in everything else that might impact the sustainability of their organization. Long before that set of buzzwords became popular, they have had the capability to monitor, predict and avert catastrophes that are perhaps equally as important as the emission of greenhouse gases: chemicals, hazardous wastes, fugitive emissions, waste water, industrial hygiene and regulatory compliance. These risks are more than compliance risks. They are operational risks inherent in business and they all must be monitored and managed.

Taking a holistic systems approach also requires implementing an IT technology strategy that aligns with the organizations enterprise wide strategies. As far back as 1999, we decided that enabling an organization to execute on their corporate initiatives for environmental stewardship, compliance, health & safety and sustainability is best accomplished through an integrated technology platform. The reason we believe in the integrated technology platform rather than a fragmented single application for each environmental issue is the concept of the interrelationship and common data elements between all of these issues. Every business I have talked to over the past 20 years wants to have an effective system in place to minimize all of their environmental risks. The reality is that it is very difficult to take an enterprise wide holistic approach to managing environmental risk when you have to rely on a multitude of single disparate applications that don’t talk to each other. If you do integrate them and try to roll up the information for management purposes and stakeholder reporting, it is costly to build and maintain the integration points between applications and the integrity of the data at a corporate level has and additional layer of risk. Each of these stand alone disparate applications actually becomes part of the risk. Why manage risk with a risky technology strategy and platform?

As a result, over the years we have chosen the integrated modular path over the “individual application” path. Our modular solutions are all excellent, but as a whole they are more than the sum of their parts. They enable the management and leaders of the organization to view their entire business from a sustainability perspective and to look at sustainability itself in the most complete possible way.

As I read in a recent AMR report, businesses need to take a hard look at three dimensions (business strategy, organizational processes and enterprise architecture) when assessing the right technology. They need to be intertwined so that businesses don’t just change their business strategy; they also change the technology and organization to match for maximum value. Called the Performance-Driven Business Network (PBN), this new business model is about synchronizing business strategy, organizational principles and enterprise architecture not just within a company, but up and down the greater business network with suppliers, customers and other partners to better compete—no, to compete at all—in the new global economy. They need to stop being project driven and become performance driven, in which change is a constant, and people, technology and business processes are changed in concert for the betterment of the business.

The result: Faster, predictable response to business shifts, a performance-driven collaborative culture, risk and compliance management embedded into operations, extended influence beyond traditional ecosystems and much better use of assets, including information and knowledge, technology, internal and external human capital, facilities and returns on invested capital.

In Bali, governmental representatives and NGOs are meeting. Again, this is good. But I guarantee that what will come out of those meetings has already been factored into a sustainability initiative by any enterprise that wishes to compete and survive. I see it every day because for almost two decades we have been on the front lines.

Tags: al gore bali carbon footprint climate change environmental stewardship ghg emissions greenhouse gases nobel prize

Entry Filed under: Sustainability, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Corporate Governance, EHS/HSE Technology