In a recent announcement, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA), released their How Digital Transformation and IoT Can Contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals white paper. The whitepaper illustrates how digital transformation can support relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) by including them in the strategic planning and execution of digital transformation activities. The white paper also advocates using a model-driven approach to define and execute a digital transformation strategy, according to the release.
“UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a framework for an organization to improve their environmental impact, health and social justice, but the framework doesn’t provide guidance on how to build the goals into corporate strategy or demonstrate how digital transformation can help in achieving those goals,” said Peter Klement, IIC Member, Associate Partner, DXC Technology, and one of the authors of the white paper. “This white paper provides a high-level approach to embed UN SDGs into the strategic digital transformation initiatives of every organization.”
UN SDGs include 17 interconnected goals to achieve a better and more sustainable future to protect the planet, ensure public health and help economies prosper by 2030. An organization can impact the outcome of its digital transformation initiative by using UN SDGs to shape the business strategy and goals.
Strategy tools, such as Object Management Group Business Motivation Model (BMM) and the Balanced Score Card (BSC), can, according the two organizations, help a company incorporate UN SDGs into their existing strategy planning and execution frameworks. A Digital Architecture Model reportedly helps an organization document its current and future business operating models and its technology landscape, and the associated strategic architecture roadmap.
“By using modeling tools and UN SDGs to strategize and refine their business practices, an organization can then answer such questions as, “How will my service or operation benefit sustainability or how can I engineer the best sustainability outcome of my design or implementation?” said Frank Zeichner, CEO, IoTAA & Knowledge Economy Institute, and another of the authors of the white paper. “This combination has already proven successful in industrial operations, protecting the health and safety of operators and reducing the carbon footprint of diesel generators, to name a few examples.”