# Key 1
Shape a CDR roadmap aligned with your company’s CSR strategy and its SDG commitments
Implementing a few best practices is a good start, but it’s not enough to quantify the improvement you make.
Focusing arbitrarily on a specific IT area to sustain does not guarantee that you will choose the most contributory, but it does guarantee the associated costs and time spent.
Simply assessing CO2 emissions on a non-exhaustive IT perimeter will not meet CSRD requirements in the future.
So take your first steps towards sustainable IT in the right framework, with the proper objectives and the relevant expertise at your side.
# Key 2
Setup governance bodies & reporting objectives to monitor your overall performance
in compliance with regulations
The transition to sustainable IT is a transformation program that needs to be governed. This means involving all your stakeholders, clarifying everyone’s scope and pace, and of course regularly monitoring individual contributions for the successful execution of your collective CDR roadmap.
To help you do this, you should define and monitor relevant indicators that measure your activity. These should be neither excessive, nor too technical, nor too specific. Instead, they should be wisely compiled into easy-to-understand dashboards to communicate widely and compliantly on your achievements.
# Key 3
Focus on simplifying your data collection process,
and don’t believe the unrealistic promises of one-click automation
Digital covers a wide range of areas to be considered in an impact analysis: infrastructures, applications, usages, purchasing, internal policies, governance, teams, training, projects….
Heterogeneous data, both qualitative and quantitative, some of which needs to be extracted from your systems and probably cleaned up, and some of which is not even stored in your systems.
Initially, you won’t be able to do without data management. It’s essential that you seek to simplify and automate through APIs all aspects of your data management but let’s be clear full automation is not soon on the agenda!
# Key 4
Make sure you guarantee your company’s CSR stakeholders
on-time, repeatable, compliant and cost-effective sustainable IT results
Relying on the manual IT sustainability results provided by consulting firms every year, and very likely more frequently in the near future, doesn’t seem to be the right strategy in terms of autonomy and cost.
Relying on an Excel sheet to assess the impact of your IT means forgetting that you’ll need to enrich, update and reprocess your data and calculations as regulatory guidelines evolve.
Only professional SaaS-based tools can offer you regular functional enhancements, spare you time-consuming in-house updates, natively provide recurring assessment capabilities and, above all, guarantee that you’ll be compliant with current and future Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) regulations.
# Key 5
Commit your ecosystem to demonstrate explicit IT sustainability
Assessing the carbon footprint of internal IT is a virtuous first step, but certainly not sufficient when most CIOs work with external IT partners.
All IT providers must undergo this exercise, which has been mandatory in France since January 2023. And the result, depending on the split of your internal/external staff, can weigh on your carbon impact.
Even more crucially, major roll-out or merger-acquisition programs that CIOs often outsource will have to assess the carbon footprint they generate and which CIOs will have to account for. These IT suppliers are looking for solutions to provide their customers with something other than crude extrapolations based solely on average emissions per employee in their company.
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