Sustainability reporting at the project level

Abstract

Currently, sustainability is a core strategic priority of business management. Despite the recent global economic crisis, businesses‟ commitment to sustainability has grown in past years. Businesses increasingly measure and communicate the sustainability performance of the whole organization, in a common practice referred to as sustainability reporting. However, businesses feel challenged when trying to quantify and analyze their sustainability performance. This difficulty businesses face is further hampered by a lack benchmarks for the practice of sustainability reporting. This paper addresses these lacunas by proposing a sustainability reporting approach that focuses on the level of project activity instead of the whole organization. Data regarding 15 consulting projects of a professional services firm is sourced for the application of business intelligence methodologies. This project level approach allows the construction of a sustainability analysis and reporting system with added perspectives on sustainable performance. Results reflect the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability in those 15 projects and enable the quantification of sustainable performance and progress. This paper also shows that, although inherent problems regarding the finding of relevant data subsist, internal benchmarking is feasible. Furthermore, results point to the possibility of establishing industry-wide benchmarks, for the broad class of service-providing firms whose activity is similar to the one of the analyzed firm