Are IT and Sustainability in the Same Team?

The debate

The nature of a company’s core business strongly determines the place of sustainability on its agenda

According to Véronique Toully – in charge of sustainability at the pharmaceutical company UCB – “Sustainability is about the future. It is about taking the right decisions now.” At UCB, sustainability has been high on the corporate agenda for more than a decade yet. And it still is. After all, as a supplier of pharmaceutical products, one has a clear social responsibility. Caring for the patient and, by extension, for the employees is part of their mission. The S (social) is therefore very central in their sustainability strategies. This S covers several aspects: internally by working on diversity, reducing the salary gap, the burn- out ratio and social return on investment (personal development), and externally by setting up social initiatives (obviously in the medical field but also in other domains such as education).

And the role of IT? According to Véronique, IT was not even on the sustainability programme’s radar in the very first phase. Around 2010, internal IT collaborators came forward with proposals to contribute to the programme. Today, their role focuses primarily on helping the core business to become more sustainable. Next to that, IT also gets involved in the corporate objective of reducing its carbon footprint, among others, by the choice of its suppliers. After all, UCB wants 60% of its suppliers to be carbon neutral by 2025. And this seems to be where the shoe pinches: there is not yet an unambiguous answer to the question of how big the carbon footprint of IT is or can be within the organisation.