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Why this guide and who is it for?

Maturity definition

It is crucial to define what we intend to cover by evaluating the maturity, and not the environmental and societal performance of stakeholders. A simple example can illustrate the difference between maturity and performance.

Imagine that all the laptops, or desktops, used in my organisation fulfill the requirements of a relevant eco-label, the TCO eco-label, for the whole lifecycle of this type of IT equipment. If this is the case, I can consider my organisation to be performant since it uses computers that have a lower footprint than computers that do not fulfill the requirements of this label. But did my organisation request this eco-label during the call for tender that brought it to the point? If so, my organisation is both mature and performant; if not, the organisation is performant by luck and is not really mature.

Thus, maturity can be defined as the knowledge and capacity to respect the best standards and practices for Sustainable IT or ask suppliers to respect them. But respecting best practices in development does not say anything about the ultimate environmental and societal performance of a digital product or service: even software that has been perfectly eco-designed can still have a massive environmental and societal impact if it is used by millions of users.

Considering maturity is also a way of promoting a systemic and complete approach to Sustainable IT topics. Indeed, answers to open questions can cover both:

  • The standards and best practices that are respected by the organisation itself.
  • But also, the standards and best practices that it respects for the services and products that it delivers to its clients.

In this way, a computer manufacturer is in the position to respond to criteria for cloud services if it uses them. The answer “Not Applicable” should be very exceptional. This referential has the ambition to assume the extended responsibility of each player in its ecosystem.

We highlight the importance of improving the maturity of all the IT ecosystem.

In evaluating maturity, and not performance, we evaluate the capacity to communicate figures and input data, but we do not evaluate or compare the values themselves. For example, a company that generates 300 tons of WEEE per year can be as mature as another that generates 200 tons, even if its performance is not. We rely on future calls for tenders, and their contractual engagement to consider the environmental and societal performance, but this is a second step: the target of this referential is to prepare stakeholders for this second step.

Finally, some criteria may not be satisfied today, but the maturity concept enables us to consider not only what we do today but also what we will have to do in future. This referential claims to be demanding and challenging on some questions; its target is to make the digital ecosystem evolve in a more responsible way - in traceability topics, for example.

Accelerate

By working on maturity first, the Institute for Sustainable IT aims to accelerate the awareness of all IT companies and IT departments of their own footprints, and to urge them not only to ask their suppliers to communicate their footprints but also to adopt the standards and best practices that reduce them.

Launching an evaluation of suppliers is a clear way to influence and improve ESG maturity first, and later performance; this guide aims to make it easier for requesters to do this. Requesters can be final user companies; in this case both IT department and Procurement services have to work together in this evaluation initiative. Requesters can also be IT companies that want to influence their own value chains, and again Procurement will have to be involved.

By synthesizing and harmonizing the criteria for evaluating the maturity of stakeholders in Sustainable IT, the INR/ISIT also wants to make it faster for suppliers to respond to their clients’ questionnaires. If all clients adopt the same template for their questionnaires, it will be easier for suppliers to respond with similar answers.

This document should help to save time both for requesters (clients) and for companies that respond to their requests.

Many guides already sum up best practices:

One objective of this document is clearly to make these guides known to IT departments and IT companies and make them operational in these organisations. These referentials can be tuned to suit the specifics of each organisation that will create its own referential.

It will contribute to the integration of the Sustainable IT initiative in the global ESG strategy of the organisation.