Green Washing and Future-Ready Businesses: Why Data Modernization is Imperative

To avoid greenwashing, the act of investing in or proposing financial products and instruments that are not aligned with ESG principles, and to fulfill reporting requirements e.g., EU Taxonomy and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), businesses rely on comprehensive, quality, and reliable ESG data.

However, the availability and management of ESG data presents challenges that risk worsening greenwashing and leading to non-compliance if not robustly addressed. For example, the variety of formats and sources in which ESG data is available, the volume and velocity at which it is generated plus demands for upstream as well as downstream activities stretches capacity in terms of data ingestion and processing.

In most companies today, much of the relevant ESG data is still held in spreadsheets, isolated relational databases, and CSV files with business ownership across different value chains. As a result, the established workflows for extracting, ingesting and processing ESG data remain slow, error-prone and largely manual with a lack of clarity regarding controls, schedules, and accountability for collection, review, and storage.

Future-Ready Business

With sustainability increasingly dominating businesses’ strategic priorities, it is poised (by 2025) to require a greater level of data sharing and more sophisticated analytics to meet ESG goals and capture new opportunities. This is highlighted in our Deep Green Report an outcome of our collaboration with Oxford Economics to survey 3,000 executives—across every market and sector—on their sustainability plans, challenges and vision.

In other words, for a future-ready business, sustainability is accelerated with the speed, automation and intelligence of advanced technologies, modernized ways of operating, and new collaborative models within and across value chains.

Data Modernization and How We Can Help

Data modernization sets the foundation for successful data management and analysis. It enables businesses to capture, process, and integrate data from diverse sources, empowering them with valuable insights and informed decision-making.

Our industry-led Cloud solutions enable businesses with data modernization and run in multi—cloud environments to streamline data ingestion and establish reliable and efficient data integration and processing. This is not only relevant in terms of greenwashing and complying with regulatory requirements but also in terms of leveraging technology to maximize business and customer value.

Businesses – regardless of their size and industry – can benefit from the application of artificial intelligence for example. Artificial Intelligence can help businesses reduce costs with automation and augmented business decisioning, maximize customer value with personalization and building trust through more accountable AI-driven outcomes.

Generative AI in particular is helping reduce the costs and execution time of repeat OLAP queries, is facilitating high throughput by handling multiple events per second and is enhancing stakeholder experience through summarization, sentiment analysis and chatbot capabilities.

Industry Application

We continue to deliver traceable business outcomes for clients across different industries. One such industry is life sciences where traditionally the focus has been on improving patient outcomes and, when it comes to sustainability, reducing carbon footprint. Now, by activating data at scale and turning vast amounts of information into tangible insights, we are enabling self-health and access to therapies, fastening time-to-market, personalizing experiences across value chains, increasing operational effectiveness and meeting drug safety as well as double materiality requirements faster and more reliably.

With Digital Twins, the virtual representation an object or system across its lifecycle, we’re enabling stakeholders in the industry combine simulation and machine learning to study business issues based on real-time data to generate valuable insights—which can then be applied back to optimize the original physical object or systems.

Summary

In sum, data modernization is imperative for future-ready businesses to assess, monitor and analyze their sustainability impact, understand emerging risks, reduce energy consumption and emissions, and meet ambitious ESG goals while complying with evolving regulatory disclosure requirements and stakeholder demands.

Our core technology capabilities can help accelerate sustainability transformation, drive business outcomes and exploit industry-specific Gen AI innovations to unleash the power of ESG data and transform it into actionable business intelligence.