Corporate sustainability initiatives: a study of the IT sector

Abstract

The study shows that the IT Hardware segment is ahead of IT Services, ITES BPO and IT products in adopting the sustainability initiatives. The reason may be the IT Hardware segment faces stringent regulation as it deals with the manufacturing and distribution of the physical hardware products. The global IT Hardware companies are far ahead in adopting the sustainability initiatives than their Indian peers. Among the global hardware companies HP scores the maximum and the leader in adopting the sustainability initiatives. Amongst the Indian hardware companies, Wipro is the leader followed by HCL Info system. The IT Service segment is next to the IT Hardware companies in adopting the sustainability initiatives. Most of the sustainability initiatives adopted by the IT Services companies are voluntary and proactive in nature. As IT Services segment primarily people intensive, their adoption of sustainability initiatives are primarily focused around people and workplace such as policies, code of conducts, audits and certifications, HSE and workplace initiatives. While the Global IT services companies score ahead of their Indian peers overall, in certain important sustainability parameters the Indian IT Services companies score at par or ahead of their global peers. Among the IT Service companies HP is the leader in adopting sustainability initiates followed by IBM Global Services. Among the Indian IT Services players Wipro Technologies scores the highest followed by TCS and Infosys. The ITES BPO segment mirrors the sustainability strategies adopted by the IT Services companies. One of the reasons of this phenomenon is that like IT services companies, the ITES BPO companies are people intensive. Another reason may be most of the prominent ITES BPO companies are owned by the IT Services companies and they follow a uniform strategy across their businesses. Among the global ITES BPO companies HP BPO scores the highest in adopting the sustainability strategies followed by IBM. Among the Indian ITESBPO companies Wipro BPO is the leader followed by TCS BPO and Aegis. Among all the segments the IT Product segment scored the lowest. All of the IT product companies, considered in this study, are global MNCs. We didn t consider any Indian company as their presence in the IT product space is negligible. Among the IT products companies HP leads in scoring the highest, followed by IBM and Microsoft. The performance of both Oracle and Adobe are far behind their peers in adopting sustainability initiatives. Amongst the largest product players, Oracle needs to significantly improve its sustainability initiates to catch up its peers.