Addressing the ESG challenge with ServiceNow and Accenture

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has risen quickly on the priority list of communications, media, and technology (CMT) companies, which had more of a late start in this discipline compared to other industries. Active management of all three captured dimensions has become crucial.

Environmental impact measurement and targeted key performance indicator (KPI) management is key to prove urgent progress in, for example, reducing carbon footprint by reducing electricity consumption and paper usage, recycling devices, or modernizing mobility and workplace concepts.

Tracking social KPIs to document how companies create and manage equitable opportunities is becoming a central milestone for all involved stakeholders—especially with the increasing talent shortages industries are experiencing.

Building and implementing good governance procedures and workflows to document and steer good ethical, secure, and transparent business practices—at best integrated into existing security and risk management processes—is becoming a key measure in managing risk actively. For instance, fines for data protection violations often impose challenges on decentral corporate structures.

‘Media and telecommunication companies are in most cases facing a governance challenge due to their span of control and decentral structures. On the other side, they are the ones which own the most valuable data assets. ServiceNow has proven itself as a solution of choice to deal with this challenge and now comes the ESG solution spot on.’

Tom Linckens, former CIO, Bertelsmann Group – quoted from an Accenture interview in May 2023

The right ESG toolbox can help meet the regulatory requirements

The speed at which we see CMT players hunting for the best solution to run their ESG workflows has drastically increased since the European Union’s release of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This basically extends the general requirements for reporting on governance, risk, and compliance to all companies.

Many companies operate under complex corporate structures, and often include conglomerates across multiple industries and geographic regions. As such, they need to decide on the road ahead instead of falling into the trap of uncontrolled mushrooming of business unit-specific solutions.

Strategy consultant Accenture is an international leader of sustainability and the largest implementer of process and data solutions. It’s also the biggest global implementation partner of ServiceNow. Accenture summarises its observations on what successful and leading CMT companies are currently doing as follows:

• Strengthening their governance structure for risk and compliance and making ESG an integral element of it. In the future, this will become a dominant prerequisite for attracting investors as well as young talents.

• Deciding on a groupwide implementation roadmap, with the Now Platform as one of the most advanced solutions in the market allowing for central governance of data and workflows, also in decentral-operated company structures.

• Using predelivered KPIs coming with ServiceNow ESG solutions out of the box, along with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), which requires more than 500 data points for reporting in accordance with the EU Directive.

‘We observe that CSRD is a huge challenge especially for decentral-operating companies. Auditable gathering and aggregation of non-financial KPIs will be the proof point for their future readiness. The risk, compliance, and ESG solution of ServiceNow is state of the art to implement the necessary processes. Clients can even track all related initiatives with the seamless integration of Strategic Portfolio Management to develop related KPIs into the desired direction, which is an additional advantage over several other ESG solutions.’ 

Sven Hornung, Managing Director CMT, Accenture DACH

One of these solutions is the ESG toolbox, as part of the bigger risk and compliance suite, extended by project portfolio capabilities to track and manage the initiatives to help meet your ESG goals.

‘We are excited that our clients recognise our intelligent Now Platform as the game-changer to streamline their operations. It allows organisations to move beyond their organisational silos and operate as ‘one company’.

ServiceNow ESG Management (ESGM) transforms the way our clients can manage, visualise, and report across the ESG spectrum. ESGM seamlessly integrates with our Strategic Portfolio Management and Integrated Risk Management to establish an operational “command center” to holistically govern your ESG program, assess ESG-related risks, and create and execute roadmaps for achieving your net zero targets as one company.’

Katja Zur, Director Sales Tech, Media, Telco, and Energy, ServiceNow Germany and Austria

ServiceNow product specs

Harnessing the power of the Now Platform, ServiceNow’s new ESG solution serves as an operational control tower to help convert companies’ ESG goals into reality by providing visibility and transparency across their ESG programs and initiatives and helping them strategise, manage, govern, and report on these efforts on a single platform. Key components of ServiceNow’s integrated solution include: 

• ESG Management and Reporting enables companies to document material topics, establish goals and KPIs, track performance, collect and validate audit-ready data, and create disclosures that align with major ESG reporting frameworks.

• Project Portfolio Management helps build and maintain a company’s ESG roadmap, including strategy, planning, and budgeting tools plus ongoing tracking of costs, resources, and results. Companies gain visibility into their ESG investments and improve the scale and impact of their ESG efforts.

• Integrated Risk Management provides core governance capabilities plus advanced risk assessments, continuous monitoring, AI, audits, privacy, automation, and more. It integrates ESG considerations and data into effective enterprisewide risk and compliance management with a real-time view of ESG compliance and risk, as well as rich analytics that improve decision-making and business performance.

Find out more about how ServiceNow and Accenture help with ESG.

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