What would you say if we told you the future of your organization's resilience could be significantly bolstered by climate action? Well, that's exactly what our esteemed guest Abhijit Sunil, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, discusses in this engaging conversation about the symbiotic relationship of IT and sustainability. With his wealth of knowledge, Abhijit helps us navigate through the dense forest of IT sustainability, exploring its impact on an organization's carbon footprint, the role of data centers, and the unique challenges that enterprise architects often face.
We're all aware of the buzz around sustainability, but have you considered the ROI of becoming more sustainable? The discussion takes a fascinating turn as we dissect the intersection of emerging trends with sustainability services and platforms. From enhancing employee retention to automated reporting mechanisms, our conversation shines a light on the multilayered benefits of being sustainably conscious. We also delve into the expansive realm of carbon accounting and reporting, bringing to the fore the ability of service providers to decarbonize the IT stack.
As we move deeper into the conversation, we take you through the management of environmental sustainability data and reporting. Be it collecting, analyzing, or reporting data into various standardized frameworks, there's a whole world of software platforms that can expedite the process. Moreover, we don’t shy away from exploring the role of lifelong learning in this field, with Abhijit sharing his insights on everything from generative AI in carbon accounting practices to the influence of an organization's maturity on its partnerships. So, buckle up and get ready to journey with us on this eye-opening exploration of IT sustainability.
Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2024. All rights reserved.
What would you say if we told you the future of your organization's resilience could be significantly bolstered by climate action? Well, that's exactly what our esteemed guest Abhijit Sunil, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, discusses in this engaging conversation about the symbiotic relationship of IT and sustainability. With his wealth of knowledge, Abhijit helps us navigate through the dense forest of IT sustainability, exploring its impact on an organization's carbon footprint, the role of data centers, and the unique challenges that enterprise architects often face.
We're all aware of the buzz around sustainability, but have you considered the ROI of becoming more sustainable? The discussion takes a fascinating turn as we dissect the intersection of emerging trends with sustainability services and platforms. From enhancing employee retention to automated reporting mechanisms, our conversation shines a light on the multilayered benefits of being sustainably conscious. We also delve into the expansive realm of carbon accounting and reporting, bringing to the fore the ability of service providers to decarbonize the IT stack.
As we move deeper into the conversation, we take you through the management of environmental sustainability data and reporting. Be it collecting, analyzing, or reporting data into various standardized frameworks, there's a whole world of software platforms that can expedite the process. Moreover, we don’t shy away from exploring the role of lifelong learning in this field, with Abhijit sharing his insights on everything from generative AI in carbon accounting practices to the influence of an organization's maturity on its partnerships. So, buckle up and get ready to journey with us on this eye-opening exploration of IT sustainability.
Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2024. All rights reserved.
Welcome to Open Comments with myself Ash.
Speaker 2:And me Oliver.
Speaker 1:A show that opens a conversation onto career advice, career journeys, lifelong learning and more. Through this innovative podcast, we'll be offering insightful dialogues with an equal mix of humour and candour. Join us as we embark on an engaging conversational journey with a diverse set of guests from different walks of life. We hope you enjoy our show and look forward to bringing more topics into the fold for you through each episode. Let's dive in First. We'd like to start off with a quote by Phil Harding, archaeologist, who says without environmental sustainability, economic stability and social cohesion cannot be achieved.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ash. And so today I'd like to introduce our speaker, Abhijit Sunil. For those of you that may have listened to our previous episodes of Open Comments will know Abhijit already, but for those that haven't, Abhijit, would you like to introduce yourself?
Speaker 3:Hi everyone and thank you, ash and Oliver, for having me on this episode. I'm Abhijit Sunil. I'm a senior analyst with Forrester Research and I particularly look into environmental sustainability for Forrester Research. As an analyst, I look into the emerging services in the space and how there are various software platforms emerging to help with carbon accounting, carbon reporting and data analytics. So as part of my work, I've been looking at the top challenges that enterprise architects have been trying to solve and it's a pleasure to talk about the emerging innovations and challenges On the other hand, in the IT sustainability and climate action space.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Now we'd like to start with the first question. So to refresh our listeners' knowledge of EA4 sustainability, please can you describe it in a nutshell?
Speaker 3:Sure. So IT forms a major part of every organization's day-to-day functioning and therefore has a big influence in the carbon footprint of an organization as well. In some industries this is more than others. For example, for financial services, the contribution of IT to the overall carbon footprint of the organization could be much higher. As an example for Mastercard, we see in their sustainability report that about 55% of their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions come from their data centers and in other words from their IT stack.
Speaker 3:And Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, by the way, are direct emissions of an organization. Just to define what these terms mean, scope 1 emissions are emissions that an organization has from direct emissions that happens from its premises. So if an organization has a factory that manufactures something, chemical processes or the processes needed to generate heat, if it puts out smoke, all of that is accounted within Scope 1. Scope 2 emissions are emissions that come from purchased electricity. So how much electricity is purchased and where this electricity is purchased from, all that is under the direct control of the entity or the organization. But it is the emissions are happening at the place where the electricity is generated.
Speaker 3:And Scope 3 emissions are everything else, including the supply chain, business travel that occurs within an organization, the types of emissions that come from purchasing, or the goods that an organization sells, how it is used, that the customer premises all of that is accounted within Scope 3. So, like we said for financial services, a majority of their Scope 1, scope 2 emissions actually come from their IT stack, and this contribution of IT into the overall carbon footprint varies according to various industries and even geographies. But it is still significant enough that the enterprise architect has a major role to play in helping an organization decarbonize itself.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Now, before we move on to a research question, please can you tell our listeners why you are so passionate about writing and also the blog that you currently write for with Forrester, please?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Now this topic about climate action in the corporate world or, specifically, even sustainability in the IT space, is something that is still emerging. There are a lot of unknowns still. We are still defining metrics on how can we measure some of these aspects, how we can help address the challenges and various tools and services that are emerging in the space, and therefore it's very much tied to the efficiency of an organization and overall organizations. Companies actually have an outsized role in carbon emissions globally. For example, data centers consume about 1.5% of global energy or electricity, and this was in a recent IEA report, and this shows how significant the consumption of electricity and therefore the associated carbon footprint of data centers and all the associated infrastructures.
Speaker 3:So I started to think about this space when we at Forrester had received a lot of questions about how optimization was key for clients and how optimization tied to sustainability, and this led us to think that we must address how various metrics are emerging in the space.
Speaker 3:What are some ways in which we can help clients in measuring the carbon footprint within their IT stack.
Speaker 3:In fact, that led us to think about a technology sustainability framework that we published some time ago, and then I started looking systematically at the data center, how various cloud providers are talking about sustainability, how various service providers address this with their own clients and what are the various tools that they bring to the market.
Speaker 3:And, most importantly, what are some challenges that clients are trying to solve at this time. Some examples are how we still have metrics that are evolving around. How do we measure the carbon footprint of applications or software? How do we accurately measure the impact of networking infrastructure within a company in its contribution to the carbon footprint overall? How do we accurately report all of these metrics back? As an example, if we talk about recycling or extending the lifespan of infrastructure, how do we capture all that information and report this back? So there are a lot of challenges and interesting problems to solve in the space, and that led me to think deeper into the space and have a more well-rounded view on how climate actions role within an organization can actually be a significant part of an organization's resilience into the future.
Speaker 2:How does this tie? Obviously, being a senior analyst for Forrester, you have to do a lot of research and a lot of writing. So how does this tie into we know you mentioned it previously your block for the planet?
Speaker 3:Well, it's really interesting for me to hear directly from leaders on what are some priorities they have and what are the key aspects around sustainability that they hear directly from their own clients. I began a series of interviews that we've published as you mentioned, oliver, as for the planet, in my blog page, which are direct interviews that I had a chance to do with leaders. For example, we spoke with the head of sustainability at Cisco, the head of sustainability at Ericsson, akamai and a few other places where we asked them about the key challenges they were solving internally, some of the things that they were hearing from their own clients and where they were focusing their efforts on for sustainability. So, as I mentioned, corporations have an outsized role in addressing climate action and we heard a lot from our own clients at Forrester about how they would like to learn more about the vendors that they partner with, the service providers they were evaluating, about what types of actions they were taking and how they can help. So I talked more about what these initiatives were with these leaders directly and started to publish directly the knowledge that they were willing to share. The other interesting aspect is around the services and platforms that are emerging in the space and how various trends that we see otherwise intersected with sustainability and these services and platforms. As an example, is Generative AI. So when we are now seeing Generative AI sort of make its way into various aspects of our lives, including the corporate functions like legal or finance, etc. We are also seeing how Generative AI can play a significant role in pushing sustainability within an organization, and I recently captured some of the key things that we heard from clients and how we heard vendors were addressing this, and we published that as a blog and we are now planning to write a more in-depth report on that topic.
Speaker 3:Another example of how I have gone down some examples here is how we had to look at the real ROI of being more sustainable, and this was because initially, when we started to talk about this about three years ago or so, we realized that a lot of organizations were making the case internally for budgets, tying the sustainability initiatives they were doing with the optimization efforts they had and really trying to see how they could make sustainability sustainable internally, and that's how I started to look at where do organizations actually see any business benefits back out of being sustainable as well, and, very interestingly, we found that it expanded, or the benefits expanded to even employee retention, and how satisfied the workforce would be if an organization had a clear message around sustainability.
Speaker 3:And then we saw how having automated mechanisms for reporting or better, clear internal measurement metrics actually save time and efforts within the organization and help the organization become more responsive to client needs, actually be reactive to the questions that we're getting in RFPs around sustainability and therefore differentiate themselves too. So in a sense, we found that sustainability is actually good for business as well. As much as it could be it is good for the planet.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to see that what more companies do within their own organization has an impact on a wider scale. When you mention the employee retention and automated reporting, it's interesting. So we know you're very passionate about what you do, specifically, as we mentioned, sustainability. Can you share any other updates or is there anything else you've been working on in recent days?
Speaker 3:Some interesting trends that we're observing in the space involves how we observe various services emerge in the space and how there are various players who bring these services to the market as well. So for an enterprise architect who's looking at how they can set a baseline internally, understand if, within their context, in their company, if they can set a baseline on how much the IT stack contributes to the overall company's carbon footprint and what extra external services or solutions are available so that they can standardize some of these processes and measurement practices At this time. For such a person who's looking externally, there are various options, for example, in both the services space with even services partners they may have already and in the solution space. In fact, the carbon accounting and reporting space right now is almost similar to the early days of the ERP market, where we had various solutions emerge and they were rapidly evolving and maturing to address various client needs and including a lot of innovations and the client challenges and addressing them very rapidly. So all of those characteristics we're seeing now in the sustainability software space. So we'll talk about the services space first, because that's very interesting.
Speaker 3:I recently led a report on the various capabilities that the services providers in the space offer to decarbonize the IT stack, or in other words, it sustainability services. And when I started to scout the various challenges that customers had around the space and what were the various topics that they were looking to address, I realized that it all fell into different buckets. I mean, clients were really asking questions in different themes with service providers and how they can help address sustainability. So, first of all, where the different types of tools and specialization that service providers can bring to the table so do the service providers bring carbon accounting tools, how they made partnerships with others. Then how they helped with certain specific accelerators such as the cloud space, and whether they brought any tools that helped with cloud carbon footprint reduction. And then their experience in doing materiality assessments. So, which means that an organization needs to look at the material impact areas in the beginning so they can understand what are the key areas they can address, what are some practical areas versus what are some impactful areas, and therefore create a priority list of where they should allocate budget for sustainability. So does the provider help with those types of assessments?
Speaker 3:And then, when I asked clients about what are some key initiatives they undertook for decarbonizing the IT stack, they said that one key area is data center and cloud sustainability.
Speaker 3:So within there they wanted to understand if providers they worked with would help with energy management, water management, measuring things like carbon usage effectiveness or CUV within the data center, and then also about renewable energy procurement. So when an enterprise architect is looking at, let's say, expanding their data center footprint into a new area, new market, then who can they turn for making sure that they can address the right energy strategy in that region? Then the other thing was about networking storage and server decarbonization. Within the data center, what types of metrics, measurement practices and partnerships can they put into place so that they can address sustainability in the infrastructure they have within the company? The other big bucket that we were told by various industries actually around how they address this was about calculating embodied carbon and frameworks to calculate the lifecycle emissions of their infrastructure. So how do they do this, both with end user devices as well as with data center infrastructure?
Speaker 3:So end user devices would be the mobile phones to other handheld devices, laptops, etc. That an organization would have. And then there is the backend data center infrastructure, and how do we calculate the embodied carbon that's associated with the manufacturing and the supply chain of such devices? At the same time, how do they find the right balance of calculating and reporting and optimizing the usage carbon emissions associated with this infrastructure? And the next big bucket was around applications, so software development and the application infrastructure of an organization, like if they have a ERP system, for example. How do they calculate the carbon footprint of such a large software application within the company? Are there tools that help with that, or how do they use the right metrics? All of those aspects, and then, finally, about circular economy.
Speaker 3:Now, a lot of organizations play into the circular economy in various ways. For example, they may be addressing e-waste management as a priority. They may be working directly with vendors and take back programs, or they may be looking at how they can extend the lifespan of data center infrastructure so they can amortize the carbon footprint of every device for a longer period of time. So how can enterprise architects make the decision on when they should do an upgrade of infrastructure, considering that an upgraded infrastructure device could actually be more efficient rather than continuing to use legacy infrastructure. So if I used my current server, for example, for one more year from today, will that be better for my organizations overall carbon footprint versus upgrading today to a more efficient server so that I can save on energy for the next one year from today onwards? So how do I make these calculations, considering, if I upgrade, then I'll have to dispose of the legacy infrastructure. So what about the supply chain emissions? What about the emissions that will come from the manufacture of newer device and when it gets shipped to my premises?
Speaker 3:All of those things come into play in making a decision like that.
Speaker 3:So we know that IT leaders are trying to put together more sanity around all this and how they can put into place good metrics so that they can have repeatable processes internally, and so and the way in which they can measure these activities measure, in fact, the outcome of the efforts that they take to to make sure that you know they are doing the right thing internally. So all of these things that I mentioned were activities at Enterprise. Architects told me when I surveyed them that they were doing within the IT stack for achieving sustainability and I looked at how various service providers were addressing these challenges and it was very interesting to find that there were generalists in the space for service providers, for example, some who offered services associated with the other services they offer, like cloud migration, but then there were specialists and others who specialized just in the data center portion, not so much in the application development space, but they did data center sustainability very well with in-depth expertise. So we found some very interesting trends associated with that, with that space like that.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. It sounds like from the research you've had that a lot of work on sustainability is actually focused on becoming more efficient. Would you agree?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. In fact, almost always, sustainability will lead to more efficiency. It could be in the procurement aspects, such as in procuring energy, and it could be in the operations aspects, such as in using the energy in the right manner, in making our infrastructure more efficient, upgrading at the right time, like we talked about earlier, and it could also be at the end of life of devices, infrastructure, for example, how we dispose of e-waste and how do we have a clear circular economy strategy. So, almost always, sustainability becomes synonymous with optimization and vice versa Optimization leads to sustainability. And then it becomes very easy sometimes to point back at the, so to speak, roi of being sustainable Beauty actually of thinking about sustainability and how we can bring in more efficiencies within an organization. I mean, even if we talk about investments needed for carbon accounting practices or how we think about the investments needed for paying a premium for more or greener alternatives. Sometimes it pays off in the long run, and that's what we found in all of our research?
Speaker 1:How are organizations managing environmental sustainability data and carbon reporting in such a fast paced environment?
Speaker 3:for an organization to manage their environmental sustainability data, not only do they have to first begin to address some of these challenges that we talked about earlier, like in the data center, I think, the workplace and the cloud and a circular economy. They'll also need to have good processes associated with this, good tools and software management platforms, and we see this rapid emergence of software platforms that can help with some of this. Now I mentioned that I looked at the various service providers that help with it sustainability, but overall for an organization, there are various tools that are available now in the market that can help with carbon accounting and reporting. Now, all of these tools help with data collection, data analysis and then reporting into various standardized frameworks. So, in terms of data collection, what we mean is the data for sustainability related activities, or data, that is, that are needed for scope one, scope two, scope three. Calculations come from various sources within an organization. So, for example, the data for scope one, emissions, which is which are direct emissions, like we talked about earlier, may come from the factories that an organization may have, or it may come from, you know, the logistics team who may be managing fleets. If it's a transport and logistics company. It may come from even people who operate the corporate jet of an organization, so it comes from multiple places. Scope two, emissions, like we talked about, are emissions that come from energy consumed, so somebody within an organization would have the view of all of that. So we need to collect information from that part of the organization. And scope three, like we said, is very vast and it needs information it to calculate. Scope three we need information from the HR side of an organization, for example, business travel, how many employees commute. We need information from supply chain, so therefore maybe procurement, and even finance, and almost almost finance actually. So we need information from these multiple parts.
Speaker 3:And sometimes, in the first iteration of an organization beginning to calculate their own carbon footprint, they may have done this using spreadsheets and all of this information would be in spreadsheets or CSV files with multiple people. So can all of this information that are in multiple places and in multiple forms be fed into a central software platform that can take this information and sanitize all the info, manage all the information and then do some analysis on that? So this is a capability that a lot of companies are actually seeking and looking for in such tools. And secondly, about analysis, I mentioned that this data needs to then be analyzed. And then we are thinking at that stage about how do we visualize all this data so that it makes sense for various audiences. How do we create various scenarios so we can visualize how an organization can decovenize itself over a large period of time, such as in the next 10 years? How will our carbon footprint reduction scenario look like? So all this scenario analysis is very critical.
Speaker 3:And then, thirdly, about how all this data can be then taken and reported into various frameworks. So in the sustainability space now, there are various standards and frameworks that organizations can use. For example, TCFD is a framework that helps with analyzing the risk associated with an organization. In fact, the SEC's proposal here in the US for including climate risk as part of business risk and reporting that as part of annual reports borrows a lot of its structure from TCFD. Then there are other standards and frameworks, such as GRI, the carbon disclosure project or CDP, and all of these frameworks and standards basically look like questionnaires for a person who is trying to report. It asks a series of questions to the organization about what is your scope One emissions, how did you calculate it? What were the assumptions you made? As an example, did you have the information about business travel or did you have to make certain assumptions? What were those assumptions? How did you make these calculations? What metrics did you use? These frameworks and standards ask a series of questions like that, including the governance structure within an organization and how much emissions came from the supply chain, the carbonization efforts internally versus the reliance on carbon offsets. All of those things, and then all this data can be fed into these reports.
Speaker 3:But this is a big task for organizations because there are multiple frameworks. In fact, we can see there is an alphabet soup of frameworks TCFD, gri, cdp, sasb and a variety of others and we know. Therefore, this is a big challenge for organizations, but these tools help address that challenge. It will help with the questionnaires. Some tools help with benchmarks so that you can see what appears there and therefore you should be answering this question in this way or that. So these software platforms essentially help with automating the reporting and data collection process for a company and they also help standardize that process and calling out errors. For example, I was talking to an organization who was really trying to understand how they can classify the emissions that came from their corporate jet, so depending on, if the company owned the jet or leased the jet, the emissions that came from the jet engines when they flew?
Speaker 3:Would that be scope one, which is direct emissions of the company, or would that be scope three, which is indirect emissions that came from business travel? So there are these nuances in between for carbon accounting for an organization that are problems to solve, and some of these tools actually help with that. I mentioned earlier about material impact areas and assessing them in the beginning as a major step. This is important because then an organization can think about how addressing climate action can actually have a material impact for the company in the near future versus some other initiatives, and it brings to light some priorities for the organization. In fact, these tools actually can help with that. Some of them provide a platform to help with material impact assessments as well.
Speaker 3:So the way in which these platforms can be implemented it should be plugged into the ERP systems and HR systems, et cetera, like we saw and enterprise architects have a big role to play in assessing a platform like this, as well as how they can help with the day-to-day operations and the way in which they can make sure that data is collected from multiple parts of the organizations in the right manner and also make sure that there is a single governance structure within the organization for, essentially, a single source of truth for sustainability-related data within the organization.
Speaker 3:So all of this is really enabled by the EA persona within the organization, and every time I have a conversation with a client about the types of solutions and service providers they should assess around this, we see that there are multiple personas involved in that conversation. There are the IT leader personas like enterprise architects or CIO heads of data centers, then there are procurement and finance teams involved, and then there may be sustainability teams involved as well, as some organizations may have a focus team, some others may not, but there is a confluence of multiple corporate functions coming together and making a decision like that, and the EA team definitely has a big role to play here.
Speaker 1:And circling back to the IT sustainability services report, please can you expand on where you see the report going and how you see it becoming more evolved?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the research around the way in which IT leaders can seek external help is really centered around how we can bring some structure in the thinking associated with which service providers should somebody choose, and we see that this really depends on the maturity of an organization. Now we talked about two parallel things so far. We talked about the service providers in the IT space and then for an overall company, we talked about the software solutions and carbon accounting solutions available. Now these two things actually go hand in hand and really, depending on the maturity of an organization and how far along they've come so far in addressing some of these steps, in going from zero to one in carbon accounting, we really determine what next partnership they should be exploring. As an example, to illustrate this further if an organization has not set a baseline for themselves, does not have set internal practice for how to do carbon accounting, or haven't explored which reporting they should do, etc. Perhaps they should actually start with a software platform, and intuitively. Actually, you know, we would think that they would need a lot of external consultant support, but then these software platforms are capable of hand holding a company and giving them a visual of exactly what they should be doing, so it will even help solve some of the problems around where to collect this data from. So some of the more robust platforms available in the market now actually help with clear explanations of where an organization should then go and collect this data from, and it will automatically populate the calculation metrics such as emission factors needed for calculations etc. And there is very little that person at an organization, who may be far removed from sustainability, actually need to do in terms of setting a baseline other than really being careful about where data is collected from. So if you have crossed those bridges, then, and have a set internal baseline, have been looking at various software platforms, etc. Then perhaps you can actually think about looking at service providers who may be able to actually advise you on the right types of platforms for you or how to then look into the right data sources and essentially bringing sustainability into every part of your digital transformation that you may do as an organization.
Speaker 3:How can you evolve an internal organization for sustainability, in other words, a team for sustainability? What should the role of the CSO look like, or the chief sustainability officer look like? How can, then, you bring more innovation out of each product line within an organization? Those are all things that some of the experts who have seen the set of the places or can bring some industry experience can bring to the table. But there are these two parallel worlds to explore, really, about the types of services they can avail. And then there are these types of software solutions that can be put into place, and the maturity of an organization and the type of problems that they are trying to solve now will all dictate what types of partnerships they should be making.
Speaker 3:And, in terms of our research, some of the key takeaways that we actually got was initially when I scouted for the various reasons why somebody would ask external sustainability related services help, for it gave us a robust list of the places where an enterprise architect would be looking for to address IT sustainability, and then it gave us a, secondly, a clear understanding of where the services capabilities stop and how a solution or a software repeatable, automated platform can then start helping an organization. So we plan to evolve this into a toolkit where we can have a list of questions that clients can ask a service provider in RFPs. We want to then also look at the return on investments and investing into more partnerships like this, and eventually I'll also be looking at the pace in which multiple double clicks that I mentioned earlier, like data centers, circular economy, all of those things that clients told us they were focused on I will be looking at how they are taking further steps. What are some metrics associated with measuring them, measuring the progress in each of those, or what are some new innovative ways in which we can address them, et cetera, are going?
Speaker 3:One example is Generative AI. We are hearing a lot about how Generative AI can help with some of the carbon accounting practices can be included in software solutions, like we talked about earlier. For example, literally somebody can actually ask a software platform, just like we do with ChatGPD, about where the most amount of emissions come from within an organization and they can take actions accordingly. So you don't really need to be an expert in using the platform or with sustainability to actually interact with the software. So we are seeing some interesting evolutions like that and we'll be observing all that.
Speaker 2:Thank you, abhijit. Sustainability is, as you'll know, a big topic for the Open Group, a key initiative, and it's great that we're able to have this connection to you and be able to learn from you and pick your brain and just understand where the world is right now. On the subject of learning, we did speak about this just before the episode and it wouldn't be an open comments episode without talking about lifelong learning and what it means to us. Now, everyone has a different idea of lifelong learning and what it means to them, but I'd be interested to hear your input on it.
Speaker 3:It's a great question, oliver, and I've been really enjoying how the various leaders on this podcast have talked about their strategies for learning and how that has helped them both professionally and personally. And I'll say well, I'll start with how this aspect of learning and growth is important. In the professional aspects, I'm close to like in sustainability and then I'll back that into my own role as an analyst. So in sustainability, for example, the climate action space is so vast, there are so many opportunities, and this is something that I emphasize with students I engage with is that if you're passionate about working in sustainability or in the climate action space, you don't really have to zero in on one role for your profession. There are multiple ways in which you can contribute. For example, you could be working in the packaging industry. You could be working for a technology company that is involved in climate tech. You could be working in analytics, but you could be looking at geographical data or environmental data for analysis on predictions or modeling. In fact, you could combine all of that together. You could be working for a data center company to predict energy usage in data halls. So there are many, many ways in which you can work at that intersection of climate action, the optimization space, and how you can help contribute then to the overall climate-related activity that we need to have for the betterment of the planet. And all this requires us to constantly learn and grow in this space, where we get new information all the time and we have new research that's happening around us.
Speaker 3:We spoke at length now about the need for more metrics in the IT sustainability space.
Speaker 3:All of those are still emerging, and we have excellent researchers, both in the industry and in academia, who are looking at this deeply.
Speaker 3:All of the organizations that I've mentioned in my reports have really good teams who have been looking at the emerging needs of clients and how they can help address this.
Speaker 3:And this is one space where I'd say that all of the IT services players I've worked with, or consultants, and all of the software platforms. They all have been learning rapidly, and any work that they do ultimately helps better the planet, which is, of course, the best goal that we can have. So we see that learning is extremely important, and for me, therefore, as an analyst looking at the space, I've found that growth really trumps everything in terms of professional and personal growth, in both the sustainability space and otherwise, because if you are willing to learn, you will know that there are multiple perspectives. We'll know that there are more data emerging so we can solve more problems better, and also will be open to better ideas. Every time I've encountered a leader who is adamant about a stance they've had or biased in their opinions, it's mostly because they're close to often close to learning from what others have to offer or others' opinions are, and therefore I am convinced that learning and growth is critical both for sustainability as well as for professional development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I couldn't agree more, I guess, on the subject of that, is there anything you're looking into for yourself in the near future?
Speaker 3:Well, I'd love to continue to grow in the understanding of how we can tackle some of the more complex problems around climate action. In the corporate climate action world, things are evolving all the time. We talked about how companies or corporations have an outsized role in its contribution to carbon footprint and also in how we can help with abating climate-related challenges. So we really need a lot more collective action, and I'm hoping to be plugged into the research that's happening in the space. There are some amazing research bodies who are bringing together experts. There are also research activities happening in multiple universities to tackle some of these challenges, and there are students who are looking at various solutions and problems to solve, and therefore we must have that attitude of always be looking out for more ways to solve problems.
Speaker 3:An example that I often like to quote is how the Yale Climate Communications team have been doing a recurring survey and a study about how there are six Americas or, in a sense, six belief systems even in the US and I think they've expanded that globally as well about how different belief systems exist in climate action. So it's never black or white whether somebody believes that they should be acting for the planet or they do not believe in climate action. It's divided up in multiple stages. Some are extremely curious about this, but some others are oriented around action. Some others are somewhat in disbelief and maybe even need more information. So when we see these different belief systems come even in the corporate world, that means that we have to drive some of these decisions just based on data and take off some of the biases that we may have, and all of those require much more information so that we can drive a lot of the decision making that we do based on data.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I know we've spoken a lot about sustainability, but for the Open Group, ea for Sustainability, enterprise Architecture is a key thing we've had in the last few years. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the partnership between Forrester and the Open Group for the Enterprise Architecture Awards that Forrester are hosting this year.
Speaker 2:And it's just a great way to recognize organizations and individuals for their efforts towards enterprise architecture, and I think it goes well with the subject of lifelong learning, and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the awards and the winners.
Speaker 3:True, yeah, I look forward to.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, thank you, Abhijit, for joining our show again. It was great having you back on and discussing the evolving services and tools in the EA for Sustainability Space and beyond, and we'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our listeners, the Open Comments community, who have been tuning into the podcast. We've really been enjoying bringing different topics into the fold for you, along with a vast variety of subject matter experts and more. Please stay tuned for the next episode coming soon. Thank you, stay safe. Thank you everyone. Thank you.