Transcript: Leveraging technology to drive sustainability outcomes

Transcript

Sarah Boden: Technology for technology's sake is not going to solve your challenge. You need to be very clear on what your users need and the technology that you can provide to solve that.

Matthew Mernagh: Our job as technologists is to solve business problems for the bank, and ultimately we have to partner with a huge number of people across the organisation.

When we look at our success over the last two and a half years, a large part of that has been leveraging data and technology that's already in the bank. And I think that has been one of our biggest successes, where we've built, honestly, as little technology as possible and tried to leverage what's already in place.

Ellie Ball: Cross-functional collaboration is really crucial to addressing all of the sustainability reporting requirements, particularly for regulations such as CSRD.

Shyam Bertilsson: So here at Haleon, we're on the same journey I think a lot of companies are on. We're really being driven by CSRD, and we're looking at our overall sustainability reporting process.

I found that bringing the tech teams and the data teams in very early into the project was very helpful. If you really take your time to understand the data that is needed, the ownership, the quality and the governance around this, this really sets you up for success going forward.

Tom Loukes: The regulations that are coming to market is way, way in excess of what we've seen previously when it comes to non-financial reporting. A lot of that is currently sat across disparate systems, disparate technologies. So bringing all of that together can be a real challenge.

Bivek Sharma: So the first thing I would say to a chief sustainability officer is how are you linked in at a cross-functional level? How are you working with your chief finance officer? How are you working with your CIO, your CTO, your technology leadership?

The technologists are looking for progress through technology as quickly as possible. The finance officer is looking for productivity gains. How do we reduce cost? How do we make our business more efficient? But then you've got the sustainability officer on one side thinking about, well, whatever we do, how can we reduce our carbon footprint? And it's really important that there's a unification of strategy and goals.

Ashar Khan: We have had a data journey and a sustainability journey, I suspect like many places have been running in parallel without the necessary collaboration between.

Umang Paw: It's all about data. Understand the data that you've got in your organisation. Understand what gaps you've got and work on actually building trust around that data. Making sure that the quality of the data is good for reporting and decision making.

Tom Loukes: The biggest mistake that I've seen companies make is to go too soon with choosing a solution and thinking about what the actual technologies themselves might be. So really understanding the requirements, the benefits that you will get from implementing the technology in the infrastructure before you start to think about the solution, helps you assess the different solutions that are out there and ultimately land on something that fits the bill.

Laura Kelly: Human qualities are crucial because you can't make any of this change without the human element. Technology is not going to solve it on its own. Technology's got to be pointed in the right direction. AI has got to be pointed in the right direction.

Ashar Khan: The biggest learning has probably been around the people and the behaviour aspect. Just underestimating that just because you have data, doesn't mean people are going to use it.

Laura Kelly: So joint ownership of programs, joint ownership of projects, bringing people together is really important because it drives that understanding across the organisation, but it also drives that collaboration and joint responsibility for this.