The con­verg­ing forces and inter­ests of cloud migra­tion, mat­u­ra­tion, and sus­tain­abil­i­ty strate­gies will be front and cen­ter when Japen Hol­list, SAP Head of Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, North Amer­i­ca, hosts a keynote ses­sion at the upcom­ing ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Cloud conference.

In addi­tion to briefly describ­ing cloud migra­tion as a clear ​“sus­tain­abil­i­ty play,” Hol­list plans to dis­cuss the urgency and chal­lenges busi­ness lead­ers face, and talk about how SAP uses its own tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices to mod­el how orga­ni­za­tions can accel­er­ate on the sus­tain­abil­i­ty curve.

To find out more about the con­fer­ence and reg­is­ter, vis­it https://​www​.asug​.com/​e​v​e​n​t​s​/​a​s​u​g​-​b​e​s​t​-​p​r​a​c​t​i​c​e​s​-​s​a​p​-​f​o​r​-​cloud

ASUG inter­viewed Hol­list as a pre­view of his keynote speech, con­densed and edit­ed below. 

Ques­tion: Let’s take a step back; tell us what is appeal­ing to you about speak­ing to this audi­ence and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the best prac­tices cloud event?

Answer: That’s a good ques­tion. Any chance to explain more to SAP clients about sus­tain­abil­i­ty is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty. The oth­er aspect that intrigued to me is that the focus for this event is cloud. Cloud is in and of itself is, by nature, a sus­tain­abil­i­ty play. The whole process of mov­ing from on-prem and into the cloud plays right into the sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals for any corporation.

I’m not a deep expert on cloud, but I do under­stand that when you migrate soft­ware from exist­ing data cen­ters to cloud envi­ron­ments, ener­gy use is con­sol­i­dat­ed, and com­put­ing resources are max­i­mized. In state-of-the-art data cen­ters pow­ered by renew­able ener­gy, cloud com­put­ing is even more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly. It’s a fun top­ic to think about: how cloud migra­tion strat­e­gy impacts emis­sions reduc­tion goals in the sus­tain­abil­i­ty strat­e­gy. This is a top­ic some IT peo­ple may not even be con­sid­er­ing yet. 

Q: Will that be the pri­ma­ry area that you’re talk­ing about, of cre­at­ing aware­ness of cloud as a sus­tain­abil­i­ty play?

A: No, that won’t be the only top­ic. I’ll talk about a cou­ple of key things. The [ses­sion] abstract talks about why sus­tain­abil­i­ty at all? Why are we going to do it now? Why SAP? Why is sus­tain­abil­i­ty a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge? Why is it a mega-trend that’s mov­ing mar­kets? How is it expand­ing our def­i­n­i­tions of cor­po­rate account­ing, and why is it so data-cen­tric? And then, to top it off, explor­ing this idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty as a jour­ney, not a destination. 

If you were to ask me, ​“I under­stand you’ve been mar­ried for 30 years. How is your mar­riage?” And if I were to tell you, ​“Well, I think it’s sus­tain­able.” That’s not where I want to be. Now remove the rela­tion­ship exam­ple and insert your busi­ness. Or, say you ask me, ​“How’s your busi­ness you’ve been run­ning for 30 years?” And I answer, ​“We’re not even sus­tain­able yet.” Again, it’s clear­ly not where I want to be. There is much more beyond it than just being sus­tain­able. Don’t we want our busi­ness­es to be flour­ish­ing, impact­ful, thriv­ing, or vibrant? So we real­ly want to move the nee­dle on all the dimen­sions of sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is just the first goal. It’s the bot­tom rung of the lad­der. But because it’s such a chal­lenge, we often view sus­tain­abil­i­ty as the final goal and, it’s not.

Q: It’s not the endpoint?

A: It’s not; it’s the first point, the first goal. It’s just a long way to get to that first goal. We should have been sus­tain­able all along. It’s imper­a­tive to have this mind­set. It’s like we’ve got these great sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals for 2050. We’re going to be net zero [car­bon emis­sions], and we’re going to take bet­ter care of our peo­ple, and we’re going to be more diverse… And we push that out to 2030, 2040, or 2050. The goal is just the start­ing point.

Q: Oth­er themes you plan to present?

A: As time per­mits, I will talk about some of the lat­est reg­u­la­tions com­ing from the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion. What do they mean for sus­tain­abil­i­ty? And then, I’ll use some exam­ples of why sus­tain­abil­i­ty might be impor­tant to cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion and how some com­pa­nies use that as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. Final­ly, I’ll talk a lit­tle bit about SAP as an exem­plar and as an enabler.

Q: Can you talk a lit­tle more about SAP as an exemplar?

A: There are sev­er­al areas in which SAP sets an exam­ple. For instance, we do inte­grat­ed report­ing. Inte­grat­ed report­ing is crit­i­cal because it means tak­ing your finan­cial infor­ma­tion, income state­ment, and bal­ance sheet in an annu­al report and includ­ing all of the ESG data per­ti­nent to the cor­po­ra­tion. It’s impor­tant. If it’s per­ti­nent to the busi­ness, then investors ought to know about it. 

Q: How long has SAP been doing such reporting?

A: SAP pub­lished its first inte­grat­ed report in 2012. When you do an inte­grat­ed report, the assump­tion is that those num­bers are accu­rate, audit­ed, and attest­ed to by a senior exec­u­tive. This is not the prac­tice of most North Amer­i­can com­pa­nies. Instead, the prac­tice is to pub­lish only the finan­cials in an annu­al report, which has all the rig­or of data assur­ance, audit, and attes­ta­tion. Then they’ll do a cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty report that is not audit­ed. Some­times pieces of it will be; you’ll see the Car­bon Dis­clo­sure Project has audit­ed the emis­sions data in the report. That’s a good start, but it’s not put in the annu­al report that goes to investors.

An inte­grat­ed report says we see it all as being impor­tant for our stake­hold­ers and share­hold­ers, so it’s all audit­ed and attest­ed to because it’s going to finan­cial mar­kets. So that’s a step SAP takes above and beyond where most North Amer­i­can com­pa­nies go today.

Q: What do you want your audi­ence, your vir­tu­al audi­ence, in this case, to remem­ber most?

A: It comes back to why do any­thing? And why you should act now and choose SAP and for the val­ue we’re bringing.

Why do any­thing at all? Busi­ness has sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems that we are all wrestling with: Emis­sions, report­ing, reg­u­la­tion, over con­sump­tion pat­terns. We have lin­ear busi­ness mod­els that take raw mate­ri­als, make prod­ucts, and cre­ate waste by the garbage truck­load. There’s a need to act and to change now. We have to take this seriously. 

Busi­ness­es need to do bet­ter across the areas of their peo­ple, the envi­ron­ment, and soci­ety, or they’re going to fail. They need to be lead­ers. The world is look­ing to them. Their cus­tomers are look­ing to them. 

If you don’t take action now and try to do the bare min­i­mum, your com­peti­tors might choose the oppo­site strat­e­gy, and you will be left — not just behind — but woe­ful­ly behind. You can’t catch up lat­er. The eco­log­i­cal­ly and sus­tain­abil­i­ty-mind­ed con­sumers will sim­ply cause you to lose your social license to oper­ate, and you’ll fail. So, I think busi­ness has got to engage the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion who this stuff is real­ly impor­tant to and to their chil­dren, to their grand­chil­dren, and great-grandchildren.

And why SAP? Because we are end-to-end across busi­ness process­es. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is data-cen­tric. SAP has a wealth of our cus­tomer’s data, and we run many of their crit­i­cal busi­ness process­es. We may not have it all, but we have a lot of it. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty teams are going to rely on SAP’s data. They need our busi­ness process­es to change. They are going to look to our sys­tems to assure data for audit and attes­ta­tion. A glitzy annu­al sus­tain­abil­i­ty report pro­duced by cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be insuf­fi­cient in the future. It’s will migrate over to be con­trolled and audit­ed by the CFO. That’s a very dif­fer­ent stan­dard from what we have today. Think about it as the ​“SOX-ifi­ca­tion” of ESG.

SAP has the data and the track record of depth and breadth across all your crit­i­cal busi­ness process­es. You’re going to rely on that data and will have to evolve those process­es to become sus­tain­able. And no one is posi­tioned to do that as well as SAP. We are a great part­ner for you.

Dis­cov­er more insights, news, and Sus­tain­abil­i­ty updates from ASUG here.