Organisations across industries are expanding their Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) programs into a formal environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiative. But ESG is more than a glossy PR campaign and considering what’s at stake, companies simply can’t afford to get it wrong.
The biggest issue with these initiatives, however, is that the frameworks of accreditation are fragmented. Unclear is what data should be collected from who and against what metrics. But also balancing benefits and proper ROIs for the long term, is a challenge CFOs are facing.
A lot of data needs to be collected to get an entire view of where you stand and what you need to change. Not just internal data, but also external resources need to be tapped into. However, financials shouldn’t be burdened with manually collecting, combining, and reporting on collected data. If only because, as mentioned earlier, basic tasks make the workforce lose interest in it.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or Intelligent Automation – RPA combined with artificial intelligence – could make a difference there.
Automation helps to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems. In other words: collecting and combining data for the use of ESG metrics could be automated, ensuring financials a much more exciting role.