As some of you already know, I’m quite interested in the linkage between corporate sustainability, also known as corporate social responsibility or CSR, and business intelligence. There’s a very logical place for BI teams, processes, and technologies in CSR.

CSR wraps the traditional, profit-making business efforts in ways that reduce their impact on both the environment and society. This is often referred to as the triple-bottom line-balancing financial, social, and environmental ROI.

Each company’s sustainability goals will be unique. Manufacturers may look at reducing fuel consumption through optimizing shipping routes. Hoteliers may look both at recycling guest waste and hiring from the local community. Builders may look to use more renewable building materials.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was formed to create a common framework for companies to report voluntary reporting of economic, environmental, and social activities. It doesn’t specify what to report, but rather how to report. The GRI has adopted strategies to promote standards and provide assurance to stakeholders. These include consultation panels, internal audits, and independent reviews.

Though CSR metrics are not always easy to measure, companies should make sure the metrics they gather are both suitable and available. The metrics should be objective, relevant, complete, and consistently measurable.

Today, many large, well-known companies are producing annual corporate sustainability reports. These are actually done in a very similar fashion to the “annual report.” Companies use these reports to inform shareholders and communicate with the public to:

• Demonstrate their interest in the environment, their employees, and the communities they serve
• Show their commitment to human rights and fair labor policies
• Promote transparency with employees, shareholders, government regulators, and NGOs
• Enhance or protect their brand or reputation
• To grow shareholder value

Some of the companies reporting include Nike, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, AT&T and Intel. There are even more in the GRI featured report list. Take a look at some of these reports. I think you’ll find them fascinating and you’ll see the depth in which they’ve been able to establish metrics for CSR.

As a BI practitioner, consultant, or vendor, it’s time to start planning how you can support CSR. Are you being given a seat at the table? Can you help the CSR team think differently about gathering data for hard-to-measure metrics? Perhaps a CSR scorecard is in order to provide ongoing visibility.

More companies are realizing they can no longer selfishly think only of their profits. Stakeholders are beginning to demand they reduce their impact on the environment and contribute to social justice both with employees and the community.

What will be your role?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Came across this stunning TED video that demonstrates scientific data in both 3-D and audio. It’s not only functional but beautiful as well. Increasing the way we sense, perceive, and interact with data is brilliant. Is this the future of BI?

Having watched the video, I find a renewed appreciation for the super intelligent minds out there. The video showed just how complex data can be and I wonder if we can do something similar with our BI tools one day. Do we need super intelligence to understand our data?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Socialytics. I love this word – it perfectly captures what it is — analysis of social media. I’ve only heard it used a couple times but when Michael Fauscette of IDC wrote his post, Socialytics, I decided to investigate it further.

I wondered who plays in this space today. Though there aren’t many, there are more and more social media analysis vendors with solid offerings. In his e-book, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, author Phil Sheldrake details 16 of them that responded to his request for interviews.

I then wanted to know more about the types of analytics that might be looked at. I liked the way David Bakken broke down social media data in his post, Social Networking, As Seen by the Economist. He looks at these three dimensions as a way to stratify the levels:

Content: Just what is it that is being talked about. Could be brand or product mentions, could be sentiment. What are people saying?

Source: Who is generating the content? How does the content vary by characteristics of the source. He mentions the difficulty of knowing more about the “who” and suggests companies like Facebook might sell that information as a new source of revenue.

Connectivity: Who is talking to whom? This is probably most about influence and the value of networks — something that has proven very difficult to measure prior to social networking.

(…some time passed, and then…..)

I had this thought:  With many of the social networking companies looking for a viable way to make a sustainable income, why not sell socialytics from their platform to interested parties? They hold the valuable key – the data.

BI vendors would do well to partner with social media analysis companies and call on the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to provide this new service as a joint partnership. Not only will all these social conversations create a wealth of data to be managed, they will also require a powerful analysis tool and a presentation layer that is easy to use and understand — something BI vendors are masters at.

Note to BI vendors – socialytics is here. Are you ready?

P.S. As I finish this post I found one vendor already moving forward. Ron Swift from Teradata just put out a timely post, Social Media Marketers Should Get Ahead of the Curve, where he talks about Teradata’s partnership with social media analysis vendors and creating integrated web intelligence (IWI) that combines socialytics with data from the data warehouse creating extremely valuable insight.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

The Copenhagen Climate Summit has come and gone. World leaders have returned to their respective countries with their pressing priorities. You would think the low rumble of the Summit has gone dormant again, but look behind you. Consumers are not only thinking green, but beginning to take “green” actions. President Obama has pledged to help utilities install 40 million smart energy meters so that consumers can take real-time actions to reduce unnecessary energy usage. Consumers, like you and me, will soon have “energy intelligence” (a term coined by Information Management’s Robert Farris). So how do businesses get energy intelligence?

Businesses are being asked not only to cut costs, but to do so especially in the area of energy usage, demonstrating they are doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint and take advantage of PR benefits of being “green.” Stakeholders, including customers, investors, and regulators, are now expecting it.

Energy costs in business average around 10% of the operating expense budget. It’s a number that the Dept. of Energy says could be reduced as much as 27% with the right techniques—decision support and operational efficiencies. It’s the classic performance management scenario: getting visibility so you can take action.

Sure, you can review your energy bills, but those are as much as 30 days old and don’t usually give you the level of detail needed to make appropriate changes. Even better, you could monitor the facility management systems used to track the usage and health of your heating/cooling, lighting, and water systems. Still not enough to make the right decisions. Were there one or 100 employees in the building that day? That information may be in another system like HR or security.

This is where Robert Farris’s post on Energy Intelligence suggests a business intelligence approach. He states it so eloquently in his post:

An energy intelligence system can integrate data from islands of energy usage information (building management systems, building sensors, utilities, etc.) and combine it with other operational data from your enterprise applications (supply chain, manufacturing, HR, finance, customer relationship management, asset management, etc.) to provide visibility to trends in usage, costs and efficiencies – across all locations, sub-locations, and building systems.

By bringing this information together in one place and providing BI capabilities – trending graphs, dashboards, near real-time monitors, exception alerts, location-comparison reports and detailed analysis capabilities – an Energy Intelligence system can help company leaders understand where efficiencies are and help them make informed decisions about what actions will provide the most return.

With more and more companies creating a career path and C-level positions for sustainability leadership, business intelligence vendors and corporate BI teams need to step up and educate organizations about the use of performance management for energy intelligence.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I’m very pleased to see another business intelligence software company has added an offering for corporate sustainability reporting. On December 15, 2009, SAP/Business Objects announced their comprehensive sustainability solution, joining both Actuate and SAS.

Corporate sustainability is increasingly becoming an integral function of the business and reporting plays a key role.

“Sustainability is increasingly mission-critical across the corporate world,” Stephen Stokes, vice president of Sustainability and Green Technologies at AMR Research, said in a statement. “Managing and reporting an organization’s sustainable performance via transparent and high quality data collation, analysis, optimization and modeling is a new basis for defining and communicating operational excellence.”

Businesses are looking to their business intelligence providers for reporting solutions they can integrate into their current BI environment – solutions that will help get them up and running quickly.

That thought led me to wonder how easy it is to find reporting solutions for sustainability. I first did a Google search for “corporate sustainability reporting solution.” The good news is SAP made it to the first page. SAS made it to the second page, and I was five pages deep and never found Actuate.

Interesting, what I did find was Oracle talks about sustainability but doesn’t have a dedicated solution.

Next, I went to the SAP, SAS, and Actuate websites. I wanted to know how difficult it would be to find their sustainability solutions. With SAP just releasing their news two weeks ago, you would have thought it would still be front and center. Intuitively, I thought I would find it in their Business Objects section, but no luck. Finally did a search and found it in their SAP solutions section. However, I tried going straight to the solution section (without using search results) and could find not it.

So I tried SAS. They were a little better. Nothing on the home page under “solutions” but hit the “more products & solutions” link and you’ll find their offering.

Lastly, took a look at Actuate. Nothing mentioned on the home page about sustainability solutions. Nothing in the navigational menus. Making it more difficult, they organize by product and don’t have a menu for solutions. Finally resorted to doing a search. Actuate’s sustainability solution came up easily.

All of this shows that business intelligence solution providers are making good progress in addressing the demand for sustainability reporting, but they are still falling down in helping prospects and customers find their solutions.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI