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How Do You Benchmark Your IT Sustainability?

Posted by Neil Sheppard on March 11, 2024
How Do You Benchmark Your IT Sustainability?

IT sustainability is vital for the future of our planet, as well as your bottom line. How do you benchmark your sustainability to learn how much work you have to do?

IT accounts for between 2% and 3% of the world's carbon footprint. That's 730 million tonnes of carbon per year, which is close to the 800 million tonnes generated by worldwide air travel.

All this is making IT sustainability a major focus for regulators looking at environmental, social, and governance (ESG). It's also a key concern for investors and customers, who are seeing ESG issues increasingly appear in the headlines.

It's no wonder, then, that Gartner predicts that 25% of CIOs will have their compensation linked to sustainability by 2027. This means that, sooner of later, IT leaders will be coming to enterprise architects looking for positive news on IT sustainability.

How do you answer questions about how problematic your IT carbon footprint is? More importantly, how do you know how to improve?

To support you, we worked with PwC to create a sustainability assessment process within the LeanIX platform. To find out more, download our co-authored whitepaper:

USE CASE: IT Sustainability

Starting Out With IT Sustainability

Benchmarking your IT sustainability is the first step in prioritizing your sustainability initiative. If your carbon footprint is relatively small, then reducing it becomes a nice-to-have project; but if it's large, then it may need to supersede your existing initiatives.

What's key here is knowing how much of your organization's carbon footprint is being generated by your IT function, and what precisely is causing it to be so high. This will mean identifying which applications are producing the most carbon and what essential business functions those support.

This means having a platform that can track information across your entire application portfolio, including data about their sustainability and carbon footprint. With an advanced platform, you can then view your carbon footprint overall, and identify areas of concern and opportunities for improvement.

Your IT Sustainability Map

A Forrester survey found that the two main stumbling blocks to hitting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets were: immature internal data management practices lack of trust in ESG data to make decisions

Having a complete map of your sustainability data down to each individual application and component can solve these problems. Likewise, an audit trail as to where the data came from and how it was acquired can go a long way to winning your stakeholders over on data quality.

Having this data to hand means you're prepared to answer any C-suite question regarding IT sustainability, and it can immediately surface areas for improvement. All you need is the right platform to create your ESG map.

Leveraging LeanIX With The PwC Framework

We knew enterprise architects needed the right toolset to manage IT sustainability in the current climate. That's why we partnered with PwC to build one.

We began by working with PwC on supporting a customer's sustainability transformation project so that we could see in real time what data enterprise architects need to hit environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets. PwC then built a set of metrics by which you can judge the maturity of your IT sustainability.

We built those metrics into a new type of application Fact Sheet within the LeanIX platform to allow our customers to track the sustainability of their applications along with their performance and compatibility metrics. This allows you to build a complete map of the sustainability of your application portfolio.

The LeanIX ESG Capability Map

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IT sustainability can only be achieved with accurate intelligence. That's why you need a complete and detailed map of how your application portfolio impacts environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets.

Within the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture platform, you can now create ESG Capability Fact Sheets to benchmark, target, and track each application's energy consumption. You can then log the ESG maturity of the application and road map your way towards greater efficiency.

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These ESG Fact Sheets are linked to projects and initiatives to monitor your progress and track your overall application sustainability. Build yourself a road map to optimal ESG and analyze your progress towards your targets, all within the LeanIX platform.

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With LeanIX, you can immediately offer a shareable, visual dashboard benchmarking and tracking your IT sustainability to anyone in your organization who has questions. You'll also be ready to tell leadership exactly what you need to do to improve it.

Discover The Power Of IT Sustainability

Using the LeanIX platform, enterprise architects are in an ideal position to make a difference on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues and IT sustainability. This makes enterprise architecture even more important for enterprise, but also offers a way to drive efficiency and profitability, while also protecting the planet for future generations.

The ESG Capability Map and ESG Fact Sheets are currently available within the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture platform. Whether you're an existing customer who wants support taking advantage of these tools, or you're new to LeanIX, get in touch to find out more about what we can do for you.

To book a demo of the LeanIX ESG Capability Map, contact us now:

Request demo

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