I spent this morning facilitating a mastermind-style session for Sustainability managers in a particular manufacturing sector. The theme was legislation, which I was dreading as a. I’m not a legislation specialist and b. compliance isn’t the sexiest of topics (which helps explain a.). It went well, but, as we joked at the end, it was more of a therapy session than a solutions session. And all the grief came down to the data burden: collecting it, collating it, reporting it.

My overwhelming impression was that all this data is essential to building a sustainable economy, but despite decades of talk about ‘big data’, ‘data mining’ and AI, the (and I use this term with a grimace) flow of data comes down to hundreds, probably thousands, of individuals building their own spreadsheets. Each person would then call their major suppliers and ask “Can I have this data?” only to hear “We don’t have it available.” Often multinationals don’t have a standard system for all their different locations, meaning data can’t even be shared seamlessly internally.

This is an efficiency disaster and explains why I regularly hear Sustainability people complain that their departments spend 50-80% of their time on data, not on doing the stuff to make that data trend in the right direction. Of course there’s a smorgasbord of software platforms who claim to be able to manage CSRD etc, but are they all interoperable? After all, if you have three major customers who have bought into different systems, having to run all three systems yourself hardly helps.

We really could do with an international body to set the underpinning data formats, in the same way that the International Standards Organisation now manages the once proprietary PDF format for sharing documents. New legislation could then be folded into future variations of the standard, everybody could update their databases rather than starting a new one and the information would keep flowing. Then the people I was talking to this morning could get on with what we need them to do.