Solutions Overview Continued...
An article on the link between CSR and intangible assets by Allen L. White, senior advisor for Business for Social Responsibility, indicates "Accountability to all company stakeholders—employees, communities, investors, civil society—through engagement, disclosure and constructive responses is a precondition to business success. Accountability fosters trust, and trust, arguably a company's single most valuable asset, takes years to build but only days to lose. Research indicates the effects of accountability in the form of high standards of social and environmental disclosure on share price performance and share price volatility."
Stakeholder trust is obtained through relationships, transparency and accountability. Stakeholder opinions are qualitative or subjective. They change based on changing perceptions and expectations. Their opinions are important however - they are the foundation of your externalities. You need a framework for capturing and mapping their opinions to the issues. Many vendors have tools for measuring quantitative data but lack the ability to capture and map qualitative data - yet this data is necessary to obtain the holistic view of the organization.
Andrew McAfee, research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, says "new IT capabilities will bring science to management decision-making". He argues that companies need to consider how they blend intuition and data when making decisions. " If you're not now using data and scientific analysis to back up intuition when making a decision, you will be".
But how can you manage qualitative and quantitative data when you are not capturing the information? How can you avoid duplication of efforts if the data is not shared because most departments in global companies operate in complex silos? How do you assess your impacts on all of your stakeholders without a holistic view of all of your externalities and their impacts?
Documenting the process of management decision-making and capturing the rationale behind highlighting one piece of data over another is, qualitative in nature. Our approach accepts the fact that decision making is a qualitative process, and there are things we don't know and therefore it is best to not only capture the decisions, but to also capture the process we followed and the information we used to arrive at those decisions. This will enable companies to correlate their decisions to the outcomes, and improve their decision making processes to produce more effective results.
In his paper "Qualitative Growth", Fritjof Capra states: "Qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships among the parts. Hence, we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we try to describe them in purely quantitative terms. Quantities can be measured; qualities need to be mapped".
StakeWare is a catalyst to embed an externality framework by providing a sustainability information framework that combines qualitative and quantitative data management and the holistic stakeholder view. Stakeware's OnDemand Sustainability software modules provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution for internalizing externalities through stakeholder engagement, sustainability reporting, corporate philanthropy, and carbon accounting.
What differentiates Stakeware from other software vendors is that Stakeware extends beyond managing quantitative data to also include the capture, mapping and visualization of qualitative data.
Stakeware's OnDemand Sustainability software gives you a holistic view of all the risks and opportunities associated with your Corporate Responsibility strategy. It enables you to more effectively engage your stakeholders and to document and map their opinions on the issues.With the Stakeware solution, you can instill a more scientific mindset in your organization and drive more intelligent business decisions.