Corporate Sustainability is no more an act of philanthropy but an act of essential business practice. The educated and aware consumers of today are very conscious about how the brands and companies they associate with are stepping back to look at the big picture and take actions for a greater good.
In order to meet the demands of the market, the companies taking steps to address their ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) issues. A lot of activities in this direction are happening in the automotive sector. However, with time as the demand-supply curve is becoming increasingly steep, a new need has arisen among the corporates in form of a technological solution for addressing the ESG issues.
Responsibility of Tech Firms
Tech firms of today have two-fold responsibility – first is to reduce their own carbon emissions, and second to help their customers reduce their carbon emissions by providing them with a technological solution. Several IT firms across the world have taken up the task of reducing their own carbon emissions very sincerely. Some of the France-based IT services firms are in fact, leading in reducing the carbon footprints in the IT sector. It is the other complementary role of the Tech firms, which is to help the customers in reducing their emissions, is where there is intense competition.
Collaboration between Accenture and Salesforce
With an aim to provide a comprehensive tech-based solution to business enterprises for addressing their ESG issues, two leading US-based tech companies Accenture and Salesforce have decided to form a partnership in Jan 2021. Through the collaboration, the two technology powerhouses plan to introduce to the market tech-based services to help the enterprises track and measure their progress in implementing sustainability initiatives in a better manner.
The two companies plan to leverage Accenture’s Sustainability Services, Salesforce Sustainability Cloud and Salesforce Customer 360 to provide the CXOs of the companies with better visibility into their previous as well as current ESG data, including carbon usage, thus facilitating them in adhering to the regulatory requirements.
Currently, Salesforce Sustainability Cloud provides users with a platform to track their carbon footprint and report on climate data. Leveraging the collaboration, Accenture will work with clients to help them integrate Salesforce Sustainability Cloud into their business models while addressing industry-specific requirements.
The unique thing about the partnership is that the two companies in a collaboration plan to expand the platform and introduce new capabilities in it by including additional environmental metrics on it such as water and waste management as well as metrics related to social issues such as diversity and inclusion.
Inclusion of social issues related metrics on the platform is particularly new and impressive since several tech vendors such as IBM, Verizon, and Salesforce have for years been promoting greater gender and racial diversity in their own workplaces; in fact, many India-based IT services providers release data on the number of women they employ. However, the market hasn’t seen the widespread availability of solutions that address these concerns.
