Wrangling ESG data: The CIO’s next challenge

Many organizations vest responsibility for creating what are usually called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports in a corporate sustainability officer or similar title. But lately there has been a growing call for CIOs to play a larger role in ESG efforts, especially when it comes to meeting increasingly rigorous ESG standards and frameworks. In fact, Gartner urges CIOs to get ahead of the trend and cultivate relationships with their sustainability peers. “This is very quickly becoming another portfolio that the CIO absolutely has to care about,” says Chris Bedi, CIO at ServiceNow, which uses its own ESG Command Center product line to create the company’s ESG report. Measurement is technology-intensive Part of the reason is because emissions calculations are becoming more integrated with operational systems such as enterprise resource planning and manufacturing automation. IT organizations are also driving the build-out of the edge computing networks that will be used to measure emissions in the field.