This month, Adam Green speaks to Casey Wells, a senior managing director leading Accenture’s business in the Northeast US, and Michael Hughes, a sustainability strategy and technology director at Accenture, about the latest United Nations Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study on Sustainability, and how business leaders are thinking about sustainability at a time of rising global instability. A dramatic set of challenges — from inflation to labor shortages, trade regulation and geopolitical instability — are forcing businesses to navigate new levels of uncertainty, and threatening efforts to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This podcast explores how CEOs are trying to build resilience against those challenges by putting sustainability at the core of their businesses. We also discuss the role of technology in driving the sustainability agenda, and shortcomings in global regulatory frameworks.

Read more about some of the topics discussed in this episode:

United Nations Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study on Sustainability

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This month, Adam Green speaks to Denise Zheng, lead for Responsible Metaverse at Accenture, and Mark Carell-Billiard, global lead of Technology Innovation at Accenture labs, about the booming interest in the metaverse and the key challenges now faced to ensure it is developed responsibly. There is significant pressure on companies to stake out their place in the metaverse, as they explore use cases and principles to guide responsible development. From energy use to privacy, this podcast looks at the main risks of the metaverse, and the role of partnerships, industry codes of conduct, regulations and technology itself, like green software, to provide guardrails and ensure the metaverse is a force for good. The discussion also explores the key skills and competencies necessary to excel in the metaverse era as companies navigate the opportunities and risks of web3.

To read more about some of the topics discussed in this episode, please click on the following links:

The Green Software Foundation is a coalition of organisations dedicated to building a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for creating and building green software.

Uniting technology and sustainability: How to get the full value from your sustainable tech strategy

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This month, Adam Green speaks to two green software experts about the environmental implications of code, how businesses should think about software in their ESG strategy and the best practices to building and running green software. Navveen Balani is Chief Technologist at the Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture, and Ziliang Zong is a Professor at the Computer Science department at Texas State University. Together, they discuss how software can have deleterious impacts on the environment through wasteful and inefficient design and use, the energy costs of sophisticated hardware, and why businesses have yet to fully acknowledge and respond to the challenge of greening IT. As companies look to the metaverse as a new era of the digital revolution, promising ever-increasing computing intensity, it’s crucial to get green software principles embedded. Navveen and Zilliang explore the influential role of CIOs in driving change, and best practices like green-by-design approaches, an IT decarbonisation plan and using software to lower overall commercial power use, especially through tools like AI. They also discuss the work of the Green Software Foundation in introducing standards, benchmarks and performance specifications to help green software development to scale.

To read more about some of the topics discussed in this episode, please click on the following links:

Measuring sustainability. Creating value
In this 2022 report, Accenture drew the following conclusions around sustainability measurement

Uniting Technology and Sustainability
This 2022 study, drawing from a survey of 560 companies with over one billion dollars in revenue, shows how companies with more comprehensive sustainable tech strategies are performing better across the board and presents three key ingredients for success.

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