Award-Winning Cisco Sustainability Data Foundation Takes the Stage as Key to Sustainability Success
By Colin Seward
Cisco’s ability to advance ambitious environmental sustainability goals comes from leadership and our next generation environmental sustainability strategy: the “Plan for Possible” — a strategy that defines our key priorities to connect a regenerative future. Importantly, making progress toward these goals requires data and technology — specifically, our Sustainability Data Foundation (SDF). Cisco’s focus on data-driven environmental sustainability contributed to our recognition this week as an Impact Award recipient by SustainableIT.org.
Cisco’s Chief Sustainability Office team had the honor of accepting this award at last night’s SustainableIT.org Impact Awards & Gala, an event that celebrates outstanding contributions to sustainability in IT. This event brought together leaders from across the globe to exchange ideas and inspire change. And Cisco’s SDF was recognized for its success in enabling a data-driven approach to environmental sustainability.
The SustainableIT.org Impact Award is a testament to the hard work and commitment of our team. It shines a spotlight on a critical and driving force behind Cisco’s environmental sustainability journey—the SDF.
The Role of Data in Environmental Sustainability
The creation of Cisco’s SDF was driven by this core idea: to build an enterprise data platform that would serve as the main source for environmental sustainability-related data within Cisco. The SDF consolidates, analyzes, and integrates data from different sources and enables predictive modeling to support our environmental sustainability journey, as well as those of our customers and partners.
Progressing toward net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across our value chain by 2040, supporting customer expectations, and rigorous environmental sustainability reporting requires robust and actionable data and infrastructure to guide decisions across Cisco.
Our SDF does just that, playing an essential role across use cases such as:
- Strategy & Performance: Providing insights to better track progress and develop strategies to advance our public environmental sustainability goals.
- Products & Solutions: Empowering engineers to make design decisions to support environmental sustainability and develop dashboards that provide insights and recommendations for customers.
- Go To Market: Supporting customer expectations for environmental sustainability-related data on the Cisco products they buy and recognizing its importance in purchasing decisions.
- Purpose & Reporting: Supporting transparent and rigorous environmental sustainability reporting.
The SDF handles a wide variety and complexity of data and supports the needs of multiple stakeholders — from CSOs to CIOs, product designers to sales teams.
From SDF Concept to Business Impact
Consider a use case that spans both product and go-to-market, a product carbon footprints (PCFs), which estimate the global warming potential of our products.
Our customers request this information from us regularly. In fact, there has been a significant increase in customer requests for PCF data, with requests doubling over the last 12 months. This reflects a growing emphasis on environmental sustainability reporting and transparency in purchasing decisions.
The SDF supports this with a streamlined, automated approach that reduces manual efforts. It allows account managers to upload a list of products and quickly receive formatted, easy-to-read results.
The dashboards enable users to explore the estimated PCF across the manufacturing, transportation, use, and end-of-life stages of the product lifecycle. Beyond this, the dashboards in the SDF provide graphical representations and deeper insights into the PCF data. Moreover, new sets of dashboards are being developed to track changes in PCF results over time, highlighting where improvements have been made and where further action is required.
SDF– Building on Success, Evolving for the Future
When we embarked on the journey to create the SDF, I was inspired to lead this project because I could envision its impact and importance. The focus on use-case-driven design enables us to support business needs and address critical problems. And, in two years, we’ve made tremendous progress. We’ve been able to use the data and dashboards in the SDF to make recommendations and provide insights to our customers and partners. We’ve also been leveraging the data in the SDF to streamline and automate GHG emissions calculations and build models on Cisco’s emissions trajectory towards our 2040 net-zero goal.
The SDF is supporting several key areas of our business. It currently provides data to 25 distinct applications and tools, offers validated insights through user-friendly dashboards, and has been recognized as a critical new component of environmental sustainability success.
In addition to this week’s award from SustainableIT.org, Gartner has cited Cisco’s SDF as a best-practice example, validating the impact and necessity of a robust data infrastructure in the environmental sustainability landscape. I’m incredibly proud of our success and am looking forward to advancing our environmental sustainability goals even further.
Given the growing complexity and demand for environmental sustainability data and its diverse audience, it’s critical that we consolidate datasets and make the data easily accessible and understandable. The SDF aggregates a wide array of data, from product operations and supply chain information to customer usage and third-party emission factors.
Data is a key to our environmental sustainability efforts. The SDF’s continued development is integral to advancing Cisco’s environmental sustainability strategy and supporting others on their sustainability journey. The SDF continues to evolve as we address the needs of our business and our customers.
For those interested in learning more about how data and technology are powering environmental sustainability, visit Cisco’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) Reporting Hub.
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