News & Events

Carbon and Environment Daily

24 November 2011

The carbon price means sustainability managers now have senior management's attention – but they risk squandering it unless they front up with good data, according to David Solsky, CEO of software provider CarbonSystems. 

"Data-driven, data-centric approaches are going to be absolutely critical," Solsky told a carbon pricing seminar in Melbourne.

Well-managed, high-quality data is also essential to build support for change across the organisation and to demonstrate to boards and senior management that expensive investments to boost efficiency are delivering, he said.

"When you do large infrastructure projects, so in a commercial building you do a large boiler grade or an HVAC upgrade … you want to know that that the consumption on an ongoing basis is in line with what you'd actually expected," Solsky said.

"How do you actually verify that this asset is meeting the payback hurdles and the return on investment that you'd set as part of the business case?"

Solsky said CarbonSystems had worked with some clients that had made very large investments in resource efficiency projects "and they just simply didn't have the data to be able to provide any sort of accurate visibility back to the board around return on investment".

Data management framework

The challenge for most companies is that the types of datasets required to properly respond to a carbon price have never been centrally managed before, Solsky told the seminar.

"It's all non-financial data," he said. "It's never been collected in a centralised data repository … it's often very fragmented, it resides with different stakeholders."

Further complicating matters, companies have often paid little attention to data accuracy and supply chains are often not geared up to provide relevant information in a timely manner or a useful format, he said.

Solsky said the first step for companies wanting to fix these issues is to develop a data management framework that defines the required reporting outputs (such as reports for NGERS, EEO and/or the packaging covenant), identifies the necessary data types and where these reside in the organisation, and looks at the data formats and the scope to improve these.