Step 1 in being able to unlock major benefits from your sustainability data is having a plan.

When building a sustainability data management plan, we think it works best when you start by determining where you are at before jumping into where you want to be.

You can do this by surveying the data landscape across the organization.

Sustainability data from your operations, value chain, investments, and other sources will be highly varied in terms of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and your ability to verify may be limited.

You'll want to collect some data about your data: sources, frequency, current uses, etc.

For established companies, there may be a decent level of sophistication when it comes to data.

But for many businesses, even larger ones, the data landscape is frequently siloed, fragmented and bespoke.

We like to use a "current state>>future state" process  to help build an enterprise-wide approach to collecting, analyzing, and communicating sustainability data.

They major phases of this approach include:

1. Assess and document the current state of your data

2. Identify desired outcomes or future state

3. Create a plan to transform your data management

In this post we’ll get into some specific details about how you can define your current state using a suite of questions.

One of our favorite approaches when it comes to building strategies, plans or leading stakeholder engagement processes is to frame our purpose using questions.

We like the “key questions” approach for many reasons - in particular we find that the strength of the solutions are highly dependent on the questions asked about the nature of the problem.

Not asking enough questions, or asking the wrong questions often results in weak or ineffective solutions.

You can use the key questions approach to build a baseline understanding of your current state for sustainability data management.

The following questions will quickly reveal how much you know about the nature of your sustainability data:

How is our sustainability data currently used?

Document the current end uses, outputs, outcomes, etc. for sustainability data across your company.

We that a flow chart is a great way to visualize your sustainability data and helps communicate the inherent complexity to other stakeholders who aren’t dealing with it on a daily basis.  

Which uses of our sustainability data are most important?

We recommend doing a simple prioritization exercise on this list using a binary “required” vs “optional” classification.

This will help with your transition planning and ideal future state later on.  

What data do you currently collect for these uses?

Most areas of impact require data from multiple functions.

For example, estimating your annual greenhouse gas emissions often requires data from finance, operations, supply chain, product development, and others (to do it well).

How frequently do you collect it?

This can be driven by multiple factors depending on the end-user or stakeholders (internal and external).

For example, your procurement team may collect supplier data during product development.  

Who is responsible for collecting and using the data?

As noted above, whoever is responsible for collecting and analysis of the data will likely have existing processes and preferences that will need to be considered when building an enterperise-wide data management strategy.

What tools are used across the enterprise to manage the data?

As you start to ask other questions about your sustainability data you’ll probably start to get a sense of what the answer to this one is: MANY.

Even in smaller organizations, the number of systems, platforms, software, tools that touch data needed to manage sustainability performance can be overwhelming.

Document these because they will influence your strategy moving forward.

How would you rate the accuracy and quality of the data?

You need to know if you have any existing risks associated with the your sustainability data.

This will be particularly important for end uses that are related to regulatory compliance, public claims, or similar.

Answering this question will help identify near-term priorities for improving your sustainability data through changes in collection, analysis, or communication.

How do you deal with gaps or incomplete data sets?

Related but different than data accuracy and quality is completeness.

In other words, do you have any major gaps in the data you are collecting?

Gaps could include missing years, missing product categories, missing business units, and so on.

Again, you’ll want to document those gaps and determine what kind of risk they represent currently and in the future.

One last question to ask when it comes to assessing your curren state:

Where do you document assumptions & limitations about your data?

Sadly, this kind of documentation rarely gets done except by the most diehard data nerds which is unfortunate because it can really come back to bite you.

As soon as someone questions the credibility of a decision made based on your data you’ll wish you had a single source of the truth when it comes to how you’ve identified and addressed any weaknesses in your data collection and analysis.

While this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive it does cover most of of what the majority of organizations need to know about their sustainability data to be able to effectively manage it.