Business Challenges

Find out more about these specific business challenges currently faced by industries in the UK, and how they can be mitigated with the use of technology and other solutions.

Industry challenges are highlighted and discussed in more specified detail on our industry pages.

Click a challenge below to explore what they are and how they can be addressed with various solutions:

Get in touch to find out how Responsiv will help you solve your business challenge!

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Cloud migration is a key focus for IT and business strategies, with 94% of business leaders currently using cloud services for their technology initiatives.

Moving to the cloud, or cloud migration, is the transition of an organisation’s data, applications, workloads, and IT infrastructure from an on-premise environment to a chosen cloud host. Cloud technology can be delivered via a public, private, or hybrid cloud model. This offers flexibility and scalability to businesses. Cloud migration allows businesses to leverage expertise and resources from cloud service providers too.

Moving to cloud is not so much an issue for organisations as it is to rapidly adopt new cloud-based services and products.

Challenge

There are a number of challenges that come with migrating to cloud and adopting subsequent services. 

Strategy

Research finds that 69% of business leaders still don’t have a clearly-defined cloud strategy.

Acting on incomplete or unclear strategies is always going to lead to failure. Defining a strategy for moving to cloud for desired outcomes can be difficult in large organisations where departments are unaware of their implications on the rest of the organisation. 

Cloud Maturity

The maturity of cloud solutions is a barrier to adoption. Organisations feel they should wait until a service has been tried and tested before diving in to mitigate any risks associated with investing in ‘immature’ technology. 

Skills

Perhaps the largest challenge with migrating to cloud is the availability of the required skills and knowledge to do so.

The skills shortage (as discussed on this page) is a global issue, with an amplified focus on technical skills. Finding people with the knowledge of existing systems and workloads, combined with a working knowledge of the chosen cloud platform is important to success, but is easier said than done.

Understanding how systems can be replicated, moved, or integrated will need to be considered in the cloud strategy with the availability of skills in mind. How will this challenge be overcome?

Solution

The solution to the challenges surrounding cloud migration is not necessarily simple, requiring specific skills and expertise; understanding of the platform and applications.

Strategy

Having a clear strategy for cloud migration is the first step, not just for a single department, but for a whole organisation when looking to implement a cloud solution. Having measurable outcomes will help dictate if the migration and chosen cloud provider was successful.

Departments may choose a specific cloud platform to fit their needs, but this needs to align with the organisational strategy and offer scalability should strategies change in the future.

Third-party Providers

Finding a third-party supplier with expertise in cloud migration:

Responsiv Cloud Platforms are developed using industry leading products trusted by world leading organisations. There is no ‘immaturity’ here. Responsiv Cloud can be hosted on Azure, AWS, or any designated hosting provider as part of a managed service. This means Responsiv (Assist) take control of managing and maintaining the platform in cases of patches, faults, or just routine maintenance.

Responsiv Consulting provides business and technical skills and expertise. These skills can be utilised in getting advice over business decisions, or most popularly, defining and developing business processes. Our technical consultants have in-depth experience using a range of technologies and products, meaning they can develop, build and deploy solutions unique to the customer.

Responsiv Assist provides remote support for cloud hosting, developer and operator assistance. Responsiv support systems, people and projects.

Businesses are always looking for ways to increase their efficiency. Why? Efficient businesses see reduced business cost and an increase in productivity/output; all required for business growth.

Challenges

Business inefficiency results from a variety of things, some of which may be beyond the control of the actual organisation.

The challenge of business efficiency – or lack there of – is multi-faceted. Inefficient processes affect internal and external stakeholders, staff, and consumers. Unnecessary tasks, long wait times and turn-arounds, and incorrect data reduce satisfaction, affecting reputation and tolerances.

You have likely experienced this as a customer. Imagine you get post from the council about a change in service or a new town development – not very exciting, but then you get the same letter three more times because they have multiple records of your data stored in disparate systems. Not the end of the world, but your name is spelt incorrectly on one, your contact information is a digit off in another, and only one of the letters has all information correct. It’s a bit frustrating and ultimately, a waste of paper.

This can all be avoided by implementing a single or combination of solutions to address the wider problem.

Solutions

There are several ways organisations can address and improve their business efficiency:

Streamlined Processes

Streamlining processes does not necessarily mean automating. This can also include evaluating as-is processes and optimising to remove bottlenecks and unnecessary steps.

This activity has multiple positive outcomes, including improving staff understanding of the process and ensuring it can flow as efficiently as possible even before you look to add any form of technology (specifically new technology) to solve the inefficiencies.

Automating inefficient processes will amplify the issue.

Technology Utilisation

Following process discovery, organisations can look to technology to improve their business efficiency. Using automation, data analytics and tools can help streamline these (now updated) processes and provide important insight into any data that is collected throughout the process.

Technology utilisation refers to more than just process automation, looking at applications or platforms that address a specific inefficiency, such as resource management, team collaboration, and operational centric processes (invoicing, onboarding, recruitment).

Responsiv provide various automation products, including Responsiv Cloud Automation Platform (RCAP), Business Automation Workflow (BAW), Robotic Process Automation (RPA). These can all be utilised to improve business efficiency. Combine this with Responsiv Consulting and you can be sure that your automation project is seen through from conception to delivery. Responsiv Consulting provide process discovery workshops to understand stakeholder needs and the requirements of the process, as well as the technical skills to build out and deliver the automation solution.

Strategy Alignment

Aligning strategies across departments and the overall organisation will help with the adoption of any form of solution. When the organisation understands how their solution will impact and work towards fulfilling a strategy, there can be a joint effort in ensuring its success.

Part of this alignment includes resource allocation. Whether this be human or technological, ensuring activity is aligned  will help streamline effort to achieve efficiency in the key areas of business operations and delivery.

When looking at solutions to battle inefficiency, resources need to be considered. This means factoring in how any solution is going to be implemented and adopted, as well as finding ways to free up resources to fulfil strategic tactics where possible; removing them from having to complete menial tasks.

Decision Making

Responsiv estimate that 70% of decision making time is spent collecting the data necessary to make said decision. Straight away you can make this process more efficient by ensuring you have the right data in the right place at the right time allowing decision makers to do their job.

Data can be collated from across an organisation in seconds if necessary and compiled into reports that are easy to consume and interpret.

Understanding and managing business cost is essential for maintaining profitability and financial stability.

Businesses need to keep track of their costs and understand their cost structure to make informed business and investment decisions. Efficient cost management can enhance profitability and contribute to the long-term sustainability of a business.

Organisations have direct costs including procuring technology, offices, and salaries, and other costs such as cost of staff leaving, managing vendor relations, and time spent on tasks.

Gartner research found that the average amount of avoidable rework can take up to 30% of a full-time employee’s overall time.

 Challenge

The business cost challenge currently facing organisations is rising as the global economy is unsteady. High inflation rates, taxes, and increased costs all affect businesses as they would individuals.

This means organisations must manage spending and balance inputs with outputs. Raising costs for customers (in B2C and B2B markets) is not always the answer and risks losing business, so how else can businesses offset and manage these increased costs?

Solution

It is well understood that you have to spend money to make money. Investing in ways to monitor and manage business costs, whilst expensive to procure, will pay dividends in the long-term.

Strategy

Clear strategy for a whole organisation will help to reduce cost, making decisions fit their needs. Clarity around where costs can be reduced allows organisations to take the relevant steps to decrease cost.  Responsiv offer strategic guidance for how organisations can move forward to meet business needs, in this case, reduce cost.

Managed Service and Third-party Support

Managed services are a good way of managing costs. They allow you to focus on other issues, with the knowledge that key systems and applications are being managed by experts with the skills to keep the systems running efficiently.

Managed services also mean you do not need in-house skills, meaning organisations can save on salary costs.

Third-party support acts in a similar way, in that they remove the need for full teams of in-house skills. Support contracts can act on credit-based models to allow organisations to utilise the remote support as and when it is needed.

Cloud

Cloud platforms can be run as a managed service as a way to manage business costs, but this is not the only way cloud can help with business costs. 

Finding a scalable cloud platform without hidden fees can be hard but it is possible and they are out there. The Responsiv Cloud platform offerings are flexible, allowing for scalability as necessary with value based pricing models.

Responsiv Cloud is hosted on tier 3 UK datacentres. This means they conform to the UK’s grading standards for datacentre security, sustainability, and continuity.

Business productivity regards how much a business can get done with their resources. It is measured by dividing outputs by inputs. Commonly, the calculation is done using input as labour hours, with the output as units produced or sales volume.

Challenge

Business productivity is a challenge organisations look to improve continuously. It is a way of reducing cost and increasing return on investment. This is seen closely in the example of using labour time as the input; if this time is reduced with more production outputs, businesses are getting more from their workforce at a reduced cost.

Challenges may arise over doing this ethically, i.e., not exploiting the workforce with extra hours or less pay, etc.

Solutions

There are, like with many challenges, a number of solutions to improve business productivity.

Perhaps most obvious solutions include technology and outsourcing.

Technology Utilisation

There are countless technologies available to organisations that address improving business productivity. These range from hardware such as physical robots (manufacturing) to out of the box and bespoke software solutions.

Process Automation

Process automation may be done on large and small scales; whether it be automating a single repetitive task or a complete workflow.

To get the most of out process automation, the process, workflow, and tasks must be fully understood with all the systems, data, and implications. Automating a process that is not well understood will lead to disappointment as the outcomes will not reflect expectations.

Process automation takes the strain off staff, either aiding in their daily workloads by collecting and collating, or sending data to and from the relevent systems, or by taking the role and completing it automatically depending on the requirement.

Cloud

Cloud is a key way companies look to improve productivity. It allows organisations to access documents and solve problems remotely. Cloud also provides a user friendly experience that saves time, as it has quick data access from anywhere. Additionally, the clouds accessibility and flexibility allows organisations to adapt the virtual solution to demand. So if the platorm needs to scale up or down, it is possible to do so to keep productivity high.

SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a type of technology that means users can purchase licenses to access a product from the internet. Common examples of SaaS applications include:

• Xero
• CRM (Salesforce, Zoho)
• Outlook 365
• Google Workspace
• Zoom

SaaS is a great way to improve productivity as it allows users to access the software, and any integrated data, from anywhere they can access the internet. This was optimal during the shift to remote and hybrid working as it meant teams could continue to collaborate and access key systems and data despite not being in the office, allowing for a business as usual approach depsite the distance.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing skills is a solution to skills recruitment issues. In the context of business productivity, you can see an increase in productivity because you have outsourced specific tasks or processes to companies or individuals who can effectively and efficiently complete the role.

Responsiv provide outsourcing through managed service, Responsiv Consulting, and remote support (Responsiv Assist). All of these allow us to productively deliver projects and ongoing management and support to our customers; removing the strain from their organisation and allowing us to do what we do best.

Business risk emerges from both internal and external forces. This includes macroeconomic forces, industry specific risk, and internal company concerns.

To mitigate business risk, organisations should implement strategies and techniques to minimise impact. Understanding and managing business risk is essential to business continuity.

There are a number of categories of business risk including:

• • Strategic
  • Operational
  • Financial
  • Compliance and Legal
  • Reputation
  • Cyber Security

Challenge

For the purpose of exploring business risk, we will look at the challenges associated with operational, compliance, and cyber security risks.

Cyber Security

Cyber security has become a main focus for organisations, CEOs remaining acutely aware of the risks posed by cyber security threats; ranking them as the threat they feel most exposed to over the next five years.

All organisations are at risk of data breaches, but certain industries and businesses are prime targets for cyber criminals due to the nature of their business, assets, IT infrastructure, and attack vectors.

Organisations that maintain high volumes of customer and staff information, or assets such as currency are vulnerable due to the value of data making them targets to cyber criminals. These organisations need to ensure they have proper measures in place to monitor access to their data to reduce the chances of hacking and accidental data breaches.

Accidental data breaches can occur when user access is not closely monitored and audited. This is when users have access to data and may unknowingly be making it accessible to unauthorised parties.

Organisations that have a lot of attack vectors are also vulnerable due to the amount of surfaces that cyber criminals can get access from. Keeping control and limiting the amount of surfaces that you have to monitor is important and ensuring organisations do not thinly stretch their cyber security resources.

Managing business risk is a continuous process that requires planning and commitment.

Operational

Operational risk is various. It may regard staff recruitment and retention, business continuity (described above), or knowledge consolidation and loss.

Staff Retention

Staff retention is a keen business risk in the current environment; volatile due to the changing nature of working expectations in the remote working world.

Retaining staff and skills needs to be prioritised, ensuring an organisations workforce remains satisfied. Addressing challenges like salary, development opportunities and job security can improve overeall employee experience.

Compliance

Industries and businesses are regulated in different ways to varying degrees of severity by governments, unions, authorities, etc.

Ensuring your business is compliant with regulation is an important focus for many at the risk of audit, fine, and reputational defamation. Regulations may require large-scale business and technological change in order to become compliant. This is seen largely in financial services, healthcare, and government.

Solutions

Managing business risk requires keen insight into an organisation. What risks will affect your organisation the greatest? Which can you afford to leave whilst you focus on more iminent risks?

Technology Utilisation

Technology can be used to mitigate a lot of business risks, including knowledge consolidation (arising from lack of staff retention), cybersecurity, and compliance.

Knowledge Consolidation

Automation is a great way to consolidate knowledge of a process and remove dependencies from individuals.

To automate a process or workflow, you must understand the activities and outcomes clearly. Even before you get to developing an automation solution you can see benefits from setting out on the project through creating requirements documents that define the process and the use cases as defined by the key stakeholders. This allows you to record process knowledge.

At this point, you can start finding ways to optimise and streamline without adding any technology yet.

Adding automation technology can help mitigate multiple risks, including human error that can affect compliance and staff satisfaction, by removing repetitive tasks from their workload.

Cyber Security

Understanding where your data is being used and by who will help in locking down your database security – which holes you need to plug. 

Software can be used to monitor and manage access to data. IBM Guardium gives organisations the ability to set custom policies against their databases, including setting alerts for set users or files, and assisting in the creation of reports, audits, and compliance processes. 

Business change moves organisations forward.

It refers to the process of making modifications to various aspects of a company to implement and fulfill business strategies. These strategies and changes can be driven by internal and/or external factors.

Business change can take many forms:

• Organisational change
• Process change
• Technological change

Business change requires careful planning and strong change management strategies to be successful.

Challenge

A lack of project skills and expertise is a key challenge for organisations trying to successfully undertake business change initiatives. This lack of skill and expertise is likely to lead organisations into project stagnation and ultimate failure.

Ensuring staff are comfortable and understand any large scale changes is also a challenge when it comes to business change projects. Where staff are not onboard with the project, there is the risk of failed change adoption. This needs to be properly managed to ensure staff, as key stakeholders, are educated and included in the change process.

Solutions

Looking at solutions outside of just recruiting expensive resources with niche skillsets, outsourcing comes out on top alongside automation.

Skills Outsourcing

Outsourcing skills is cost effective way of accessing key skills needed to deliver successful projects.

Project Management

Outsourcing project management skills is an effective way of mitigating the risk of project failure. Employing the help of experts who have been through the process of business change previously allows you to benefit from their experience and avoid known pitfalls.

These skills can be brought in for the duration of the project lifecycle and no longer if not necessary.

Business Analysis

Business analysis skills can be utilised in various ways. Not least of all in providing insight into potential solutions and products for getting the desired outcomes from the business change initiative.

Technical Skills

Technical skills can used in various ways. Through managed services, consulting or remote support. These services can change based on business need and utilise the skills an organisation needs to complete a project.

Responsiv provide support at all stages of a project. For example, we provide the technical skills to build automated processes, integrating relevant systems, and support the software and process post-deployment.

 Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is critical to ensuring successful change adoption. These stakeholders are the people who do the everyday job that is affected by any change; educating them on any new technologies, processes, or partners is an important step in any business change project. Where this does not happen, it is almost guaranteed the change will fail. 

When staff feel they have been sufficiently consulted throughout the process, with their thoughts and ideas considered as part of any initiatives, it is more likely they will look fondly on the change and be suseptive to wanting successful outcomes.

Business continuity is the idea of maintaining key business operations in the face of large scale disruption and disaster.

This can range from maintaining operational processes whilst upgrading the core systems they rely on, to keeping the whole business running despite widescale systems failure/downtime (think powercuts, natural distasters).

Challenge

Business continuity is important for organisations to consider, regardless of size, industry, or customer base.

Organisations need to have plans in place in the eventuality of system disruption. Not only so staff can continue their daily tasks and keep the business running as usual, but so customers can still recieve the expected services and reduce any waterfall disruptions that arise from the original issue.

Solution

Understanding and recording potential risks and points of failure is the first step in creating a business continuity plan.

Knowing which systems are core to business operations and service delivery will help prioritise where focus is put for providing back up power supplies, etc. This can be a challenge divided by departments who use these systems, or by business continuity teams who have oversight of the whole organisation.

Cloud Hosting

As explored above, a majority of organisations have migrated or have plans to migrate to cloud. Where you choose to host your cloud platform is a personal decision, but may affect how you create your business continuity plans.

Self-Hosting

Self-hosting in a private datacentre is where an organisation owns the hardware their cloud infrastructure runs on. This also means they are fully responsible for maintaining and supporting this datacentre in the case of any disruptions.

Are there backup power supplies and data backups? What happens if all your datacentre(s) are down and you no longer have access?

Managed Service

Managed services mean organisations are not responsible for managing and maintaining their cloud hosting in the case of disruptions, rather, a third-party is.

Datacentre regulations dictate how secure a datacentre is by grading them in tiers. The higher the tier, the better the uptime provided. Typically, you want a provider that has tier three or above as the processes in place mean that your applications are less likely to be affected by downtime.

Responsiv Cloud is hosted on a tier three data centre that has sustainable facilities, 24/7 physical and cyber security features and round the clock support. This means in the case of a disaster, there is recovery support provided and an organisation should not be affected greatly.

Unsupported software can become a security problem for any organisation.

Click here for 6 reasons to keep your software up to date

Software can become unsupported for various reasons, such as not procuring support and extended support services, or the software reaching end-of-life or end-of-support.

End of life refers to the point when a vendor stops issuing updates or giving continued support, as vendors turn their focus to newer products or versions. This is typically announced in advance to allow customers to effectively plan for extended support or upgrades. End of life products may continue to be supported by the original vendor under support subscription contracts.

End of support refers to when vendors cease support and security patches for a specific piece of software. EOS software will generally have already reached EOL, making this the last time the original vendor will provide skills and support for the product.

Challenges

Maintaining unsupported software creates security threats due to the lack of patches and updates.

Known vulnerabilities are no longer covered by the software provider as they turn their focus and skills to developing and supporting newer products and versions.

Cyber Security

Cyber security is jeopardised when software is left unsupported.

With cyber attacks becoming more sophisticated with developments in viruses, malware, and other attack methods, software with vulnerabilities become a prime target. Data and systems are at risk of breaches as they become easier to access with a lack of vulnerability patches.

This unsupported software may be an attack surface that grants access to wider systems, putting data and services across an organisation at risk; not just the single system of access. This is true for accessing suppliers and customer systems should these integrations exist.

Compliance

Many industry regulations state that software must be supported in some capacity. Should companies not comply with these regulations they may face audits and hefty fines.

This is most sensitive in industries and organisations that manage large volumes of customer or staff data such as financial or health related information. These companies will not only face scrutiny from the regulator, but customers as well if there are issues with how and where their data is stored and managed.

Incompatibility

Unsupported software tends to be ‘older.’ This software is designed and built to run in combination with other systems and hardware of the time.

The longer an organisation maintains their older, unsupported, software, the less likely they are going to be able to integrate with other, newer, systems. This can pose risks of non-scalability as key systems are either developing or being left behind. Manual intervention will be required more frequently to retrieve the data from the older system that cannot integrate across the organisation.

Cost

Large costs are associated with maintaining out of date and unsupported software.

These costs may arise from managing the aftermaths of a data breach, procuring extended support, paying regulation fines, or to cover downtime of key systems and services.

Costs from unsupported software can be mitigated by weighing the pros and cons of maintaining the system.

• Is the software available as a newer version?
• Are core processes and systems supported by this unsupported software?
• What is at risk if there is a breach?
• How much will extended support cost compared to upgrading or finding an alternative software?

Solutions

There are two main solutions to managing the risks associated with unsupported software. These include purchasing extended support, or upgrading to a newer (or the latest) version of the software.

Extended Support

Extended support can be provided by the original software vendor or a third-party provider. This will allow you to keep the software supported with relevant skills and knowledge in the case of an issue, but will not provide patches for any core vulnerabilities.

Extended support can be expensive, but this needs to be weighed up against the cost of workload migration and potential downtimes. Maintaining unsupported software through extended support is a convenient solution for organisations that run key processes on older versions of software that is reliable. With this in mind, though, a risk assessment over what happens if the software is corrupted should be made.

Upgrading

Upgrading to a newer or latest version of your software will ensure you have more time before the version becomes end-of-life or support. This means you continue to receive patches and improvements from the vendor as they are continuously developing their product.

By upgrading, organisations do not have to pay for extended support, allowing them to lower the maintenance costs associated with their software.

Upgrading software can be a daunting process, so finding the right technical skills to complete workload migrations is important to ensure applications are not lost, and the risk of organisational disruption is mitigated.

Skills shortage is not a new challenge, and is one faced globally by all industries. There is a particular challenge finding technical skills. It is important to note there is not a labour shortage, but a skills shortage.

Challenge

This shortage makes recruitment a struggle; there is high demand, low supply.

Korn Ferry estimate that by 2030 we should expect a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. If left unchecked, in 2030 that talent shortage could result in about $8.5 trillion in unrealised annual revenues. 

The EU alone wants 20million technology specialists, which compares with the 9million it had in 2021. 

The challenge not only lies in finding and recruiting these skills, but also in retaining them. How can organisations mitigate the risks of losing these specific skills and expert knowledge.

So how did this skills shortage happen, and how can organisations mitigate the challenges the shortage has on it’s business?

Solutions

These are some suggestions on how skills shortages can be mitigated:

Automation

By automating processes, companies can reduce their dependence on skilled labour. In addition, the quality of their processes and data can be improved and their production costs reduced by removing the need to fix errors from manual data entry and collaboration.

This reduces the dependencies on individuals who may be the only person in an organisation who has knowledge of a process. By recording and automating this knowledge, organisation’s can maintain staff expertise without the risk of losing it when the individual leaves the company.

Responsiv has a number of automation solutions that can be tailored to an organisation’s specific business need, including self-hosted (Responsiv Unity) and cloud based (Responsiv Cloud) solutions.

This is optimised through Responsiv Consulting; discovering and recording existing processes is the first step in creating efficient and effective automated processes.

Training and Education

With an increased rate of technological innovation, there is a lag in catching up with training and education. The availbaility of training material is not created at an efficient rate, or companies cannot afford or do not focus on providing training to their staff.

New industries including sustainability demand specific skillsets that are not yet widespread.

Getting training for staff to get them up to speed with new technologies, systems, processes, etc. will not only broaden their prospects within the organisation, but will provide your company with any required skills at a lower rate than trying to recruit rare skills.

Outsourcing

This is a two-fold solution and branches to include

• • Third party support
  • Managed services

Third party support provides skills that are not permanent staff. This relieves the need for organisations to recruit skills or find budget for these rate full-time skilled individuals. They can be used when needed and only when they are needed.

Responsiv offer third-party remote support through Responsiv Assist. Using a credit-based system we can provide expert skills in IBM software as well as our own product suite including Cloud and On-Prem platforms.

Managed services are a way of outsourcing responsibility for managing and supporting a solution. It is the alternative to self-hosting, and means the supplier develops, deploys, hosts, and manages the solution, removing the strain from the organisation.

Responsiv offer managed services for a range of our product solutions, but most commonly with our Responsiv Cloud Platforms, which we host and manage on behalf of our customers. Responsiv Consulting can be utilised to develop and deploy and processes or applications to run on the chosen platform.

Sustainability in reference to business can mean two things, so the first step is to define which version of ‘sustainability’ you are referring to; environmental or business.

Environmental

Environmental sustainability is the thing on the tip of everyone’s tongue. This context of sustainability refers to how organisations are working to improve their impact on the environment; aiming for carbon neutrality, reducing excessive fuel usage, and addressing their role in climate change.

Addressing environmental sustainability has become mandated by various government policies including ESG (which holds organisations accountable for their operational performance) and shared responsibility (which will effect the supply chain) policies.

PwC surveys found that:

• • 43% of UK CEOs say they will invest in decarbonising their business model this year,
  • 43% are investing in technology to support their ESG efforts
  • 55% are investing in upskilling their people to make better use of technology to support ESG

Commitment to sustainability is increasingly becoming a key strategy for business as customers and governments demand more responsible and sustainable practices.

Solutions

There are a number of up and coming products looking to address the challenges of managing and streamlining enterprise sustainable initiatives.

Monitoring

Monitoring and measuring sustainable initiatives will firstly require a clear strategy to understand what it is a company is trying to achieve and how it envisions what success is. Having this clear strategy allows organisations to properly understand what the priorities are and where the focus needs to lie.

Monitoring sustainability will also allow organisations to comply to ESG criteria, track progress, and create resilience.

Technology

Sustainable technology is a framework of digital solutions that drive ESG outcomes. Working with the right suppliers, tools and hardware to deliver the most output with the minimum viable resources. If an organisation is outsourcing IT operations, they should ensure that the supplier is using sustainable operations.

Cloud

Cloud computing provides organisations with the opportunity to reduce energy usage as many provideres use renewable sources like solar and wind power. Furthermore, data centres are now designed to be more environmentally conscious, with smart measures in place to minimise energy waste.

Additionally, cloud datacentres use industry-grade servers that run several organisations cloud, each secure and seperate. This is more sustainable than each organisation running on multiple pieces of hardware inhouse.

Skills

New greener technologies mean new job roles and new skills to be learnt. As new roles develop, there is a growing skills gap. Organisations can address the shortages by retraining staff to give the necessary skills to work with these green technologies.

Organisations can also partner with technical experts to mentor staff on relevant processes and make use of technologies like machine learning to move towards sustainability. Outsourcing technical or hard to find skills is a solution that saves cost whilst providing the resources so sought after to achieve strategic goals.

Business

Business sustainability, or running a sustainable business, means having sustainable and viable business strategies to ensure you can maintain running the business without making a loss.

This includes looking at how products and services are priced in relation to the wider economic situation (how much power do customers have, what is inflation doing…), is there enough demand for the business’ offerings, can the business consistently deliver on their promises?

Solutions

Sustainable business can be improved by addressing costly suppliers, business inefficiencies caused by process bottlenecks, and low productivity.

Take a look at the challenges above to understand how companies can manage and improve their

• • business costs
  • business productivity
  • business risk
  • business efficiency