Fast-Forward Webinar: How the Digital Transformation Acceleration Is Supporting Sustainability Goals
Moderator: Peter Leyden of Reinvent LLC
Speakers:
Digital transformation is an inevitability. Sustainability is a necessity. How can digital transformation help achieve sustainability goals faster and more collaboratively, and with better financial outcomes?
Leaders from WBCSD, Arcadis, Skanska Group, and Autodesk answered these questions and more during the Fast Forward moderated panel webinar. Here are three of the main themes to come out of the discussion:
Theme 1: Sustainability goals were not sidelined by the pandemic, largely thanks to digital transformation.
The pandemic led to an urgent need for digital solutions that could enable remote collaboration, without sacrificing efficiency. Panelists agreed that solutions like the cloud were game-changers with regard to communication and data sharing, as well as decision-making.
The panelists also agreed that these technologies are key to bringing decision-makers together early on when designing and selecting sustainability solutions. Earlier collaboration is essential because there are time-sensitive points in both of those processes’ timelines from which there is no turning back once a decision is made.
Theme 2: Sustainability is a win-win for climate reasons but also for financial reasons. Digital transformation plays an important role in making this possible.
While the benefits of sustainability are often discussed at conferences and in the media, what may be less obvious is that sustainability also makes great business sense.
The pairing of improved financial outcomes with more sustainable solutions is attractive to climate advocates and financially savvy decision-makers and investors. Data-sharing and collaborative decision-making, enabled by cloud-based solutions, has allowed knowledge-sharing discussions about both financial decisions and sustainable choices to happen in real time, with easy integration of information. It is digital transformation that can empower precisely the kind of data-based decision-making that’s most likely to achieve climate-friendly and financially sound outcomes.
Theme 3: Digital transformation, legislation, and standardization are starting to help to improve sustainability in certain regions, but there is more work that needs to be done to scale globally.
Recently, governments, regulators, and climate-friendly companies in Europe, the U.S., and other regions are leading the way in providing guidance, standardization, and also legislation as to how to achieve sustainability.
But there is more work to be done in order to increase adoption not only within industries and countries already taking steps in the right direction but also for areas of the world not yet engaged in sustainable decision-making. The global community can be especially helpful to regions beginning their sustainability journeys by utilizing digital transformation solutions to share data, and also suggested, or mandated, standards and best practices.
