Collaboration between finance, technology, and sustainability leaders is essential to sustainable value creation. But when these leaders have different objectives and approaches, it can be tough to make the long-term match.
Desperately seeking sustainability-related value
We know that sustainability is a value creator for business and a priority for shareholders. Unfortunately, sustainability performance data is often complex, difficult to track, and challenging to apply. To manage and use sustainability data effectively, at least three teams must work more closely together — finance, technology, and sustainability.
At first glance, this might sound simple. These are established teams that already collaborate across functional lines at most large enterprises. Why wouldn’t they be able to tackle sustainability transformation together, too?
Finance is from Venus, technology is from Mars, and sustainability is from another universe altogether
While finance, technology, and sustainability teams each want the best for their businesses, they often speak different languages and have different definitions of success. Yet their ability to overcome differences and collaborate is imperative to maximizing sustainable growth.
Recognizing differences in languages and norms is the first step towards successful collaboration. Sustainability transformation depends on these teams, each of which has adjacent but different needs and desires for sustainability data management.
Sustainability led by the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO)
Develops and manages sustainability strategies, ensuring compliance with ESG standards and reducing environmental footprint. Seeks better systems to track and manage data as well as ways to quantify sustainability value in financial terms.
Finance led by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), often including Legal & Risk
Manages ESG compliance, aligns sustainability initiatives with financial health, capital allocation, and reporting frameworks. Seeks improved data quality bolstered by solutions including audit trails and governance controls to meet compliance requirements. Closely related, but perhaps worthy of its own distinction, is the crucial role legal and compliance functions play in ensuring that ESG efforts meet regulatory standards, mitigate risk, protect the company from legal liabilities, and help strengthen governance structures.
Technology led by the Chief Information Officer (CIO)
Leads technology and innovation efforts that support sustainability programs, improve efficiency, and enable data-driven decision-making. Frets about the alignment of enterprise data strategy and sustainability inputs and seeks ways to reduce the number of point solutions requiring their management.
Clearly, these teams have different approaches when it comes to sustainability transformation. However, by extending the effort required to understand one another and through compromise and collaboration, these three functions forge one of the strongest sources of sustainable value creation across the C-suite.
Happily ever after: Long-term value creation at the heart of business
Accounting for Sustainability, SustainableIT.org, the ERM Sustainability Institute, Salesforce, and GlobeScan have formed the Sustainable Value Creation Partnership. Its purpose is to explore solutions to accelerate corporate sustainability progress. The SVCP has just launched a 10-minute survey to gather the insight of practitioners – to get early access to findings and shape this important project, please click here. It will be developing and sharing conclusions based on the survey and subsequent research in early 2025. As the research program unfolds, we are going to play with this matchmaking metaphor and explore the need for better collaboration among Finance, Technology, and Sustainability teams inside companies as a means to generate more value from sustainability investments and efforts.
