As a technology leader, you have to navigate and manage a vast amount of technology vendors from IT hardware, network, data center and cloud providers, software, professional service providers, etc. IT’s supply chain is very complex, with multiple delivery networks and eco-systems that need to interact with each other.

As a buyer, this poses a lot of risk in your IT supply chain to ensure that suppliers maintain high environmental and social standards connected to the sourced product or service and their own business operations. As a buyer, you must act strategically, manage your cost base, mitigate risk, and promote sustainable business practices. By leveraging your buying power, you can influence your supply chain of IT vendors to address environmental and social issues and do so openly and consistently.

With the new legislation in the works such as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Climate-Related Disclosures (https://lnkd.in/g7KmR5Pc) proposal and the European Unions Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) (https://lnkd.in/g-u9B4ht), as a company you will in the very near future be required to not only report on your own social and environmental impacts but also your entire supply chain including your technology vendors.

So where do you start? What initial metric is relevant to get the first snapshot of your vendor’s sustainability ambitions? I think that looking at a company’s net-zero ambitions is a good place to start. It gives you a first indication where your vendor’s ambitions are and how aggressively they are looking to pursue their targets.

Below, I have put down a “non-exhaustive” summary of some of the largest technology vendors in the industry based on data points from Zerotracker (https://zerotracker.net/). The spread is quite significant in terms of ambition levels. I think it gives rise to start asking some of your vendors some tough questions.

What other metrics would you use to measure your vendor’s sustainability efforts?