- Businesses have historically had a negative impact on the environment by contributing to pollution, the increase of greenhouse emissions, neglection of responsible waste disposal, and deforestation among other things. In this paper we present an exploratory case study of an IT consultancy firm and their perspective and work with sustainable development. As a consultancy firm, the company does not provide services directly to end users, but rather help clients in their business efforts. The aim with this project has been to explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes of an IT consultancy firm, exploring both opportunities and challenges. Index Terms-Digital Sustainability, green ICT, Net Positive, Sustainable Development Goals, Sustainable Business, ICT for Sustainability
Historically, businesses have had, and continue to have, a
negative impact on the environment. Pollution, the increase of
greenhouse emissions, neglection of responsible waste
disposal, deforestation and much more, are consequences of
unsustainable business [
There are several research areas investigating sustainability
and technology; Information Communication Technologies for
Sustainability, Sustainable Human Computer Interaction,
Sustainable Software Engineering, Sustainable Business, and
Sustainability Assessment are a few examples [
Stockholm, Sweden
julia.creutz@cybercom.com
the physical, digital and biological worlds across all disciplines,
economies and industries [
In this paper we present an exploratory case study of an IT consultancy firm and their perspective and work on sustainable development. As a consultancy firm, the company does not provide services directly to end users, but rather help clients in their business efforts. The aim with this project has been to explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes of an IT consultancy firm, exploring both opportunities and challenges. The work has been delimited to the early phases of projects, when the IT consultancy firm gives clients advice on digital strategies and business development. The research question for this paper is hence: what can be the challenges and opportunities when working with sustainability as an IT consultancy firm in the early phases of a business offer?
As the IT consultancy firm have been working with integrating sustainability in their business for some time, part of the result will cover the processes they have in place. The result will also cover how they have worked with SDGs and the Net Positive approach. One major finding concerns not the formal processes, but the prevalence of an underlying ‘tech-culture’ that might undermine some of the sustainability efforts.
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs)
offer numerous of opportunities to address sustainability in
society. These include, but are not limited to, digitalisation and
dematerialization, increased energy efficiency and travel
substitution [
tial sustainability aspects ICT have impact on.
Today there seem to be a disconnection between
sustainable business and sustainable development. Firstly, there is a
gap between academia and practice which needs to be
addressed [
The typology differentiates between Business-as-usual and
Business Sustainability. A company engaging in what is called
business-as-usual (BAU) have mainly economic concerns,
focus on creating shareholder value, and have an inside-out
organisational perspective. Business Sustainability (BST) is
defined in three levels: 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. In summary, there are
three key shifts that are identified in this typology; from BAU
to BST 1.0: broadening the business concern to include
sustainability when economically feasible, from BST 1.0 to BST
2.0: expanding the value created (to include triple bottom line),
and from BST 2.0 to BST 3.0 changing the perspective, starting
with the sustainability issues in the world and then building the
business around these. This can be compared with the
MannBate maturity scale (Mann Bates, also used in evaluating ICT
for Sustainability (ICT4S) research [
The Sustainable Development Goals [
The Net Positive project aims to make businesses to go
from ‘doing less harm’ to a more positive approach to do ‘more
good’ overall [
To explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes of an IT consultancy firm, one of the authors carried out meetings and interviews at a Nordic IT consultancy. The company has about 1300 employees and offers services in all stages of the development of digital systems: creation of digital strategies, idea and prototype generation, system implementation, testing, and management. For this study, the focus was on early stages of projects where the consultancy firm provides clients with advice on digital strategies and business development. This part of the process was chosen since it may be difficult to include sustainability concerns at later stages of projects if they are not accounted for already in a strategic stage.
Initially, three meetings with the company’s head of strategic advice services were conducted to get an overview of the processes used when providing this type of service – either when the company is approached by a client or when the company approaches a client to sell its services. To gain a deeper understanding of how sustainability is, or could be, integrated into the work processes, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six people working with digital sustainability in relation to the company’s advice services (see Table I for details). The interviews were carried out in person, except from the interview with R3 which was carried out over Skype, and all interviews were audio recorded.
The interview transcripts were analysed with a focus on identifying opportunities and challenges for integrating sustainability concern into strategic digitalization and business development processes. Furthermore, the company’s processes were mapped in relation to current sustainability efforts and suggestions for how the company could continue refining their processes were developed. Employee at the company’s sales department
In this section results from the interviews will be presented. This includes the company’s relation to sustainability in general, how the company work with sustainability in their strategic advice services, and the process the company is aiming for, and the opportunities and difficulties with being an IT consultancy firm attempting to work with sustainability offers.
The IT consultancy firm was founded in 1995, and they focus on business to business sales. One respondent argued that sustainability has been there since the start, although it was not perhaps identified as sustainability as such. Rather the focus was on human resources and human rights, what perhaps could be coined as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and environmental issues (although less specified). In 2010 they launched their first sustainability report and notably they were one of the first consultancy firms in Sweden to do so. Following this, the company has had several internal dialogues about how to further improve their sustainability work. This led, for example, to one of the owners suggesting that they should start looking at what kind of external impact they could have on sustainability issues, rather than only focusing on their internal impact. After this, the company started evaluating what kind of environmental impact they might have, and what kind of positive sustainability effects they could deliver through their customers.
Today, the company put a lot of effort in using the Sustainable Development Goals and Net Positive in their projects. They make an effort to work with an outside-in perspective, which is to say a perspective that focus on need rather than product. Namely, the proposed value propositions and business plan innovations that the IT consultancy firm offer to their clients are based on the knowledge of their client’s marketplace. The greatest asset to this perspective is the customers, and the ability to differentiate between what the clients make and what the client’s customers actually need.
Early on (even before the SDGs were launched) the IT consultancy firm formulated what sustainability effects they might contribute to through their services to their customers, namely Energy savings, Dematerialization, As-a-service, Decreased Resource Use, Safety and Other, which are further described in Table II.
The IT Consultancy firm is committed to continue working
with sustainability. One external aim is to become more
proactive in their sales work which hopefully would enable them to
contribute to greater changes within sustainable development.
To reach this aim, the IT consultancy firm has developed a
digital sustainability offer within its strategic advice services
[
Strategic advice services, where the IT consultancy firm first meet their clients is the first phase where the company can help their clients with digital sustainability. A simplified overview of their general approach is displayed in Fig. 2.
The initial Internal stage begin with research of the current client in order to gather an understanding of what they offer, what their products or services are, and how they profile themselves regarding sustainability. They also attempt to find possible synergies, and do a trend analysis which involves looking at what other companies in the same industry or with similar products/services do. Other than this, they create a possible value proposition where they do a Sustainable Development Goals inventory, and analyse the possibly relevant indicators for their client.
After this, they move on to the second phase, External, which includes meeting with the client and getting their interest. In addition, they collect additional information about their client’s products/services and their work within sustainability. They focus on information that they might not have been able to find out by themselves.
During the second Internal phase they try to further analyse the client’s needs and possibilities, also with the Sustainable Development Goals and Net Positive in mind. This time around they have more information about the client’s products and/or services than during the previous internal step. They might also have gained greater insight into what the client might want or need.
This then leads to an Offer, which includes a process of workshops in collaboration with their client, as well as data gathering from their client’s customers. The implementation of the offering usually contains three separate workshops. The first workshop covers inspiration and innovation, aligned with the client’s business. The second workshop is about business model innovation, and the last workshop as about tying it all together by refining, reworking, and defining ideas and solutions. The idea is that the Sustainable Development Goals and Net Positive should be integrated during all the workshops. However, in the interviews it became clear that the above described general approach are in practice performed differently within the Strategic Advice Services. During the interviews, two different particular approaches were identified.
One of the approaches used for the Strategic Advice Services’ digital sustainability offer were described by one of the respondents as the double diamond. A summary of how it is used in conjunction with Net Positive and the SDGs is displayed in Fig. 3. The double diamonds approach is common in design, and the employee at the IT consultancy firm who use it argued that it is because of his/her background within industrial design that it is used.
"I think that it’s probably because I’m so strongly influenced by having a background in industrial design that I am drawn to this double diamond model, but I think even in nondesigny projects, it translates really well. You start somewhere and you don’t know what the problem is so you have to explore, you have to go broad and you have to maybe look for details, maybe you don’t know exactly what the problem is don’t know exactly what you’re looking for and then you start to design it to a more specific case [...] there’s always an iteration between diverging, opening up, and converging, making things more specific." (R3)
As can be seen in the quote R3 argues that the double diamond is relevant in all kinds of projects. Fig. 3 shows that the Sustainable Development Goals are assessed during the phase Discover. The questions asked during that step is “which Sustainable Development Goals are relevant?”, “how is the work we do today related to any goals?”, “and which goals are for us (the client) possible to look at in the future?”. At this point an impact assessment is also made. To do that, the question “where do we (the client) want to have an impact as a company?” attempts to be answered. The first step is rather broad, and it is during step two, Define, that more specific ideas and solutions may form. When this narrowing down has been accomplished, the outcome should be one or a couple of ideas/solutions. These can then be assessed from a Net Positive approach in the third step, Develop. An important question at that point is “is the ideas/solutions actually contributing to something good, or are they only focused on not doing any harm?”. In the last step, Deliver and End solution, respondent R3 expressed that the IT consultancy firm have work to do regarding measuring a project’s impacts, as in the following quote:
"When you come to your final solution, I think it’s gonna be a lot more about doing actual measurements, and I think that’s one of the areas where [the IT consultancy firm] maybe has… more space to develop, that we haven’t really done a lot of as I would see, fact-based impact assessments. [describes a particular case with sustainability goals but not indicators of success] I can sort of see the intent behind that, but I think for… for this process to be [...] credible, later people are going to ask those questions like ‘how did it actually work? was it actually more sustainable’, and if you cannot prove that you’re probably gonna set it off as a… as a green-washing thing or as a marketing, or whatever." (R3)
Respondent R3 argued that if they were to use the last stage to set indicators for goals and measurement, it would be easier to make fact-based assessments of their impacts.
Another approach that emerged during the interviews is displayed in Fig. 4. The first step in the approach is Finding synergies between the IT consultancy firm and its client. It is a sort of evaluation of what the IT consultancy firm can offer their client through collaboration. Step two, Research, includes research about the client and their business, their products/services, what they do within sustainability, and their current partnerships. The aim is to know as much about their client as they can to suggest relevant development. After this, a trend analysis is conducted. This is a benchmark of what other companies or organisations in the client’s industry are doing, what technical developments and trends might be relevant, and what is being, and can be done, in the said industry regarding sustainability. After these three steps, the information gathered makes it possible for the IT consultancy firm to create a value proposition for their client. The Sustainable Development Goals and Net Positive is to be considered during phase two, three, and four.
When Strategic advice services assess which Sustainable Development Goals are relevant to a project they start by exploring the overview of the 17 goals. When they identify one or several relevant goals for a project, the second step is to look further into the goals by assessing their sub targets. The sub targets are presented both during the potential value proposition and later in their sustainability report. Two respondents expressed that the presence of or relation to the goals can sometimes feel vague, and that there is room for improvement and development in this area:
”The SDGs, it’s still a bit vague exactly what we should do with them, how are we to address them and I believe that if we can get those two [SDG and Net Positive] together in a synergy, then I think that is the best way forward.” (R1)
As of now, Net Positive is integrated in the IT consultancy firm’s digital sustainability in such a way that they talk about environmental opportunities rather than obligations. They suggest an approach where digitalisation might help their client to contribute to the environment and to society, rather than only minimizing their negative impact. One respondent stated that it is rare to do this within consultancy firms, and that the IT consultancy firm aim to embrace the possibility to actively contribute to a positive development within digitalisation. What the same respondent also expressed, was that it is still a rather new approach and therefore not widely accepted in different industries as in the following quote:
“The drawback with Net Positive is that it isn’t used that much, and there aren’t that many that who understands it, and it is a bit difficult to actually, or not a little, it’s actually quite hard to measure it” (R1)
Hence it is difficult to measure the impact or success, which makes it more difficult to prove that the IT consultancy firm’s actions actually make a difference.
Being a consultancy firm makes it possible for the IT Consultancy to affect companies cross-industry and this does bring both difficulties and opportunities to the fore. Three respondents stated that they as an IT consultancy firm are used to fast changes, and one respondent said that they have the possibility to connect disruptive technical opportunities to business opportunities. The same respondent also expressed that some difficulties may be that consultancies are often considered to only be interested in selling their services, that is making profit, which makes it important to be confident in their sustainability focused offer and be able to present the customer value of working with sustainability. This respondent also stated that “there is a ‘tech-culture’ that focuses on efficiency within existing systems among many of those who work with IT” (R5), which can be an issue when trying to accomplish a Net Positive approach. Another respondent mentioned that there are engineers at the company that do not see the purpose of digital sustainability and state that they are an IT firm that should focus on tech, as exemplified in the following quote:
“This is a way to think, that we should use this fantastic development [digital sustainability] in a positive way so that we bring value to the society, it does appeal to many of our employees and especially the younger ones, but then there are of course people who think it is only mumbo jumbo kind of, and then I think they have not really understood it, and that is something I sometimes meet within the company.” (R1)
This might indicate that there are some ‘tech-culture’ members at the IT consultancy firm a well. This respondent also pursued the issue with lack of data. Often, because they are a consultancy firm, they don’t have access to all the data that relates to a product or service that they contribute to. It could be because they sometimes are not involved in an entire project, only parts of it, or that they don’t have access to data about how a product or service is used. This then makes it harder for them to address the right issues, or going deep enough into issues.
Just before the interview study presented in this paper was
done, the IT consultancy firm had started to formulate a new
more formalized process for their strategic advice services. The
process, called Digital Sustainability - Global Sustainability as
a Driver for Innovation and Growth, also referred to as
SPRING, was finished during the winter of 2017/2018 in the
form of a white paper [
Three of the respondents (R2, R4, and R5), have been involved with the creation of the SPRING process. These three respondents, as well as respondent R3, were all involved in the pilot project at some stage. Respondent R3 expressed that the process seemed interesting when reading about it, but since he/she was only part of one stage of the pilot project it was not enough to understand it fully, as in this quote: “So, I think it looks really promising but for me, personally, it needs to become more concrete, like going through it like in a specific case, one or two times before you can actually… I feel like right now it’s hard to judge like, ‘oh this is missing and that is missing’ because I haven’t experienced it.” (R3)
The respondent did however continue to argue that it looks really promising, but that it needs to become more concrete.
Overall, three of the respondents expressed that they liked the entirety of SPRING and idea behind it, and that its presence itself urges the sustainability work at IT consultancy firm forward. However, two respondents said that the process is too complicated, and need to be simplified or further explained as in the following quote:
”So, I think the whole idea behind it is great, but on the other hand, I don’t believe they have succeeded in making it simple and understandable, I think there’s much left to be done there.” (R4)
Another aspect that two respondents highlighted was that distributing the SPRING process and its purpose outside of strategic advice services has not succeeded fully as exemplified by R2:
”We have not really succeeded in anchoring this with everyone else at [the IT consultancy firm] […]there are some very good thoughts behind this and we talk about it, but there isn’t always a match perhaps on how we view things, and we might need to revise the SPRING document compared to today, and the process, in order to do it more clear” (R2)
Moreover, two respondents expressed that the customer value is not clear enough, and need to be further developed to a more tangible value.
”Well, sometimes it is hard to explain to them, the value of it. It is like, when we come to them and talk about digitalization and sustainability and such, then it can be as if they are on a totally different level, and we have to start to, like, lift the discussion a bit before we can even start to talk about this process.” (R6)
Other than this, there was one respondent who argued that the process is not too difficult, but that it needs to be implemented into the strategic advice service processes.
This paper has reported results from an exploratory case study of an IT consultancy firm, with the aim to explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes, and the opportunities and challenges of doing so.
The IT consultancy firm in this study has worked with CSR
and sustainability for a long time, and communicate widely
their sustainability engagement. Compared to many other
companies in the industry, they have a high profile as a
sustainability engaged company, and have the reporting track record to
back it up. As a consultancy firm, they have the possibility to
work with clients cross-industry, and hence have a high
potential to use ICT as an enabler to reduce impact in other sectors
[
The sustainability work has evolved over the years, and new metrics, frameworks and ideas have been added to the earlier efforts. An example of this is the SDGs, that have been added on top of the Sustainability Effects presented in Table II. Furthermore, the Net Positive approach has also been added to the mix, without removing, or aligning this with what was there earlier.
Considering the six main sustainability effects that the IT
consultancy firm contribute to (Table II), it is not clear which
effects are prioritized or to which effects most effort is put in
to. As an example, the energy saving effect lies within the
scope of sustainable ICT. Dematerialization and as a service is
more aligned with sustainability through ICT, which has a
greater potential of affecting the environment than
sustainability in ICT [
The strategic advice service is today carried out with an aim of considering both SDGs and Net Positive, but the interviews showed that this was approached differently by different people (as in the reported approach 1 and 2). The more formalized SPRING process has been developed, but not widely tested and spread in the whole organization. The interviews also showed that although the SPRING process is detailed, it is still not concrete enough. There is a need to clarify and break down the different steps, and the connection to both SDGs and Net Positive, better.
To increase the credibility of the assessment process used
within strategic advice services, it could be beneficial to use the
Sustainable Development Goals Compass [
The Net Positive approach is still rather new and not widely
adopted in industry, which can be considered both an
advantage and a disadvantage. It can communicate that the IT
consultancy firm is at the forefront of sustainable business
work leading to being approached by sustainability engaged
companies and organizations, at the same time as it to some
might seem complex and unproven. Another drawback is that
measuring the impacts of a Net Positive approach is not
necessarily easy. Good practice for measuring is still developing, and
there are guidelines in Measuring Net Positive [
In the interviews it became clear that the IT consultancy
firm had not communicated to their employees how to set
indicators for measuring Net Positive impact. The measurement
does not necessarily have to be quantitative, and cannot always
be presented in such a way either. A few basic questions for
increased transparency for companies when reporting Net
Positive are the following: What has changed? What was the
baseline? Has the problem shifted elsewhere (rebound and
displacement)? How long will the benefit continue into the future
before it is replaced (drop-off/future benefits)? [
Another aspect to consider is wherein which area a
company, or a project in the IT consultancy firm’s case, should focus.
There are five of these areas presented in Measuring Net
Positive; carbon (including energy), water, social, material use
(including forestry and waste), and ecological (including
agriculture and biodiversity) [
One challenge to the IT consultancy firm (and any
consultancy) in their digitalisation and sustainability work, is the lack
of data access. Even if the IT consultancy firm aims to
contribute to sustainability effects such as energy savings and products
or services with a positive effect on the environment, how will
they be able to prove this if they do not have long term access
to their clients’ data? Although it is not possible to measure
everything quantitatively, there are still possibilities to indicate
positive changes. An area where the IT consultancy firm could
engage in, is business to business data sharing with other
companies. This would correspond to changing the rules as argued
by Dyllick and Muff [
Despite the high engagement of management, and despite
sustainability being on the agenda within the company for a
long time, there is still issues in spreading this focus within the
organization. In the interviews it was mentioned that the
SPRING process had not spread through the organization, and
that there are still employees that do not understand the value
of working with the SDGs and Net Positive. Furthermore, there
were respondents that alluded to a ‘tech-culture’, within the
company as well as in the industry in general, which prioritizes
technological development above sustainability concerns,
which can be compared to the Cornucopian paradigm described
by Preist et al. [
This study has been an exploratory case study, based on interviews with respondents within the IT consultancy firm working with sustainability. As such, the results are applicable in other settings, but perhaps not yet generalizable. A natural extension to this work would be to not only focus on internal respondents, but to also interview clients of the IT consultancy firm. Furthermore, the focus has been on the early stages of strategic advice services, and the work can be extended by looking at later phases of the process.
One thing that often lacks in sustainability work and initiatives in practice is how to make actions and results tangible enough. This is something that needs to be further investigated and explored. There is a need for longer studies that focus on specific projects from the start to finish, and even further than that. A possible obstacle with this is that actual environmental impacts may not be apparent until years after a product or service has been implemented. One way of approaching this could be to investigate both short- and long-term impacts. Another aspect that should be explored further is how to agree on measurements cross-industry, or at least within same industry. Without a generally accepted and adopted language and measurement indicators it is difficult to compare different results. Hopefully, further work with business to business data sharing might contribute to general measurement indicators being adapted.
The aim of this paper has been to explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes of IT consultancy firm, exploring both opportunities and challenges. As such, the IT consultancy firm in the study has already been integrating sustainability in its processes, and is underway to further integrate it. There are opportunities in using the SDGs and Net Positive to drive their strategic advice services, although more clarifications are needed, as well as more work to spread the process within the organization. A potential threat to this work is a tech-culture, both within the company and within the industry, which may resist sustainability work. Furthermore, lack of data and measurement might undermine the sustainability focus effort pushed by the IT consultancy firm, in general, there is a need for more fact-based assessments of sustainability effects.
This paper is based on a Master of Science thesis report
[