'Technology can drive a positive environmental and social impact' - Sustainability solutions at Capgemini Invent UK

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Sustainability is becoming more important than ever to organisations across the globe

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Sustainability is becoming more important than ever to organisations across the globe

Computing speaks to Courtney Holm, Vice-President Sustainability Solutions at Capgemini Invent UK, to examine how Capgemini are helping their customers to embed sustainability into their own organisations

Recently, Computing spoke with James Robey, Head of Sustainability at Capgemini discuss how Capgemini is quantifying and reducing its own environmental impact. We now turn to Courtney Holm, Vice-President Sustainability Solutions at Capgemini Invent UK, to examine how Capgemini is helping its customers to embed sustainability into their own organisations.

Courtney Holm has a distinguished record in technology sustainability and environmental science and is now using that experience to build a client facing sustainability capability for the Capgemini Invent brand.

"It's really about harnessing the multi-disciplinary digital innovation expertise within Capgemini Invent. I'm completely client facing. My role is to help clients align sustainable development to their strategy and help them to use technology in order to drive and reshape the future," Holm explains.

Holm emphasises the organisational nature of the challenge but also the fact that many of the required systems for change are already in place.

"What I'm looking to do within Capgemini Invent is to embed sustainability into the way that we operate, so that as a central team will partner with the sector and capability teams, creating a networked organisation. When you think about technology, and delivering sustainability related work with technology in mind, a great deal of what we have already can be pivoted to deliver more sustainable business. We're adding a layer of sustainability expertise to what we do really well from a technology, strategy and business perspective, and then helping clients really embed sustainability into how they operate."

Accelerating Net Zero transition

In May 2021, Capgemini Invent launched a Net Zero Strategy Offering to help their clients accelerate their transitions to Net Zero and turn the blizzard of targets and pledges into more tangible results. Interest from customers has been strong. Holm explains the offering in more detail.

"We're going across the business looking for technology solutions that we already have which can be repurposed to help us drive more efficient architecture. That could be using more analytics on the edge, for example. Or it could be going into an organisation and lifting the hood of their architecture.

"A lot of organisations are migrating to cloud. We have this great tool that we can use to understand your existing footprint, so we know how many users you have across those applications, how much data you're pulling for those applications etc. We can make some assumptive carbon foot printing at an application level so that you can really take a look at the efficiency of your overall architecture and improve it before you migrate it."

It's easy to see how migrating carbon intensive applications and systems onto cloud infrastructure isn't going to make any great leaps in terms of progress to Net Zero. Holm also points to user behaviours and enterprise websites as another area where significant carbon savings can be found.

"How complicated is your website? Could you simplify and drive the impact of the website down through fewer fonts, fewer videos for example? A half hour browsing session can rack up quite a footprint as you click through, and that footprint can be measured. There's a lot of behavioural change as well that we recommend on the back of supporting an architecture, so you can start to train your employees to be smarter about how they use the internet but also how they use their machines."

Circular economy

The subject of hardware assets brings us neatly to the subject of circular economies. Holm says that clients are keen to build new business models to support the circular economy and are considering with Invent how one company's waste stream can be another's feed and how those networks can be built - and whether a financial mechanism exists to be able to make this happen. Holm wonders whether a bartering economy could begin to emerge if present systems can't adapt.

To what extent are material impacts being quantified and fed into modelling tools?

"More of the big suppliers of technology are doing that now. We're starting to see more transparency in the upstream supply chain, especially around conflict minerals, and the social sustainability aspect of technology devices is really coming to the fore at the moment. There's a lot of insights coming in from the whole refurbishment process such as child labour and other issues associated with dismantling old devices and then recycling them which tends to happen in emerging economies. There are some companies doing this in Europe, and we're hoping to bring these supply chains closer together. We haven't spoken too much about an industry collaboration for that sort of work because we don't deal in devices, but I expect to see that emerging as circular becomes more and more of an issue."

The role of technology in a more sustainable world

Holm's answer to this question about materials impact emphasises just how complex the whole issue of technology sustainability truly is. Many will not have considered some of the more troubling ethical aspects of hardware refurbishment and recycling. From the outside, and even at times from the inside, the pace of change in reducing the impact of technology can look infuriatingly slow. Holm advises patience and education to affect the behavioural changes required.

"I've been working in this space for around twenty years, and it's so easy for me to say - just stop doing that. But sustainability is an enormously complex topic. What we're finding is that lots of our clients have some policies and some procedures in place. They're not robust enough, but our clients are so welcoming of opportunities to learn, so I've been really free with sharing information to clients about what they can do to be more sustainable when it comes to things like device management, but also their architecture and how they can improve. There are a lot of simple things you can do, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune."

Holm's background in environmental science has clearly shaped her views on the role of technology and its complex role as being both a contributor to climate change but also part of the solution.

"It's really important to emphasise that technology can drive a positive environmental and social impact. People shouldn't forget that. And I think it's important to think about technology as having capability to deliver a common goal.

"At the crux of sustainability issues is that we're not close enough to nature, so we don't value it. I'm hoping that technology will help us build biodiversity, help us drive efficiencies and the way that we operate so that we're not as carbon intensive, but also enable emerging economies to have a better impact. Technology has the potential to be able to spread education and knowledge in a way that non- digital solutions can't."

Computing speaks to Courtney Holm, Vice-President Sustainability Solutions at Capgemini Invent UK, to examine how Capgemini are helping their customers to embed sustainability into their own organisations

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