Doing the right thing

Dow Chemical Company CIO Dave Kepler is not only responsible for Dow's Shared Services and Information Technology departments, but is also very involved in Dow's 2015 Sustainability Goals. Kepler told CIO magazine recently of his belief that sustainability is about the world and Dow's contribution to some of its challenges. Ten years ago the company set environmental and safety goals around things like injury and illness, process safety and chemical emissions, he said, and progress to date has been significant. "One of our goals was to reduce our energy consumption by 20 per cent, and we reduced it by 22 per cent. We also achieved an 84 per cent reduction in emissions.

"We expanded beyond those initial goals recently with Dow's 2015 Sustainability Goals. We intend to improve our environmental health and safety performance by 75 per cent within the next eight years. IT touches almost every one of our goals. For example, IT is charged with creating databases to track environmental activity -- measuring our emissions, tracking the safety and performance of our carriers, and managing our contractors. IT not only manages the information but it serves as a watchdog."

Dow has such stringent process control automation at its plants that they will shut a plant down automatically if it is not compliant with air and water emissions requirements. IT also helps provide safety assessments for all of Dow's products. Ultimately the company plans to provide stakeholders with key information related to the safety and risk of every chemical from Dow, via an integrated database that tracks consumption, usage and loss of a given base material.

And in the US, after Fairmont Hotels & Resorts' move to power all its check-in computers with wind power proved so successful last year, it is now expanding the initiative to include all computers in its corporate office. The organization claims last year's purchase of Eco-Logo certified wind power for 249 check-in computers will result in a greenhouse gas reduction of almost 100 tons over the next year.

The first step to reducing your environmental footprint is to measure it. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) aims to make reporting on economic, environmental and social performance -- sustainability reporting -- by all organizations as routine and straightforward as financial reporting. To achieve this, the GRI continually improves and builds capacity around the use of the GRI's Sustainability Reporting Framework, currently the de facto global standard in sustainability reporting and built on the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

An AMR Research survey reported early 2007 that within the next two years 89 per cent of companies in the US and 62 per cent in Europe plan to use technology to manage their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. It also found that while environmental issues are of prime importance in Europe, US firms seem to be ahead in the integration of CSR-related data systems. Currently, 47 per cent of European companies either gain no CSR-related data from IT systems or have numerous disconnected systems, compared to just 19 per cent in the same position in the US. Nearly half of US companies (49 per cent) claim to have some or fully integrated systems to provide information on CSR topics.

"What CIOs should expect from their business application providers are really the tools to bring together the fragmented programs that they're trying to manage today into an integrated dashboard that would allow the CIO and decision makers across the company to better manage their CSR and green business practice in a more integrated manner," Lawson Software's Frank says.

Alan Perkins, former CIO of Australian company Altium, says CIOs should aspire to as close to perfect information as possible. "The more unity, timeliness, accuracy and relevance in the information captured and provided to decision makers and users, the greater the efficiencies," Perkins says. "This will result in focusing attention on contributing to society and profit-making. Get the efficiencies right and you will be able to focus on doing the right things.

"For example, GE has come up with a new device called the eco-dashboard that is designed to let home owners know how much energy and water they are using and how trends track over time. Since the unit also doubles as their thermostat and central port for all their home systems (like security, and so on), it can help people learn how to conserve and how much they are conserving. Taking this logic to the workplace can be the start of changing behavior."