Global professional services firm EY announced the launch of its new EY Sustainable Operating Blueprint, aimed at providing companies with a framework to embed sustainability into enterprise strategy.
According to EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services (CCaSS) Global Leader Alexis Gazzo, the new blueprint was built to provide a roadmap for companies to address the key challenge of integrating sustainability across all functional areas of the organization to enable value creation, rather than treating sustainability in isolation, as is currently the case in many companies.
Gazzo said:
“Across many organizations, sustainability remains the remit of specialist teams — disconnected from planning, procurement, product design or performance management. That gap may limit businesses’ ability to manage risk, capture opportunity and translate ambition into outcomes.”
Gazzo said that the new offering provides an “AI-enabled, structured roadmap for accelerating an organization’s transition,” providing clear steps tailored to each organization, starting with defining ambition and strategic direction, helping organizations assess where they stand and identifying gaps, and defining and prioritizing actions to enable transformation.
According to EY, the new blueprint is built on two pillars, including “strategic clarity,” which guides organizations on how to prioritize sustainability through decision making, engagement and preparedness, and “operational embeddedness,” to turn ambition into systems and processes through key levers including capabilities and skills, processes and technology, products and services, organization design and governance, and monitoring and evaluation.
Gazzo said:
“At this inflection point, sustainability must shift from a reporting exercise to a strategic value driver: when embedded into how a business operates, it can unlock innovation, build resilience and help enable agility to position organizations for the future. This is about harnessing sustainability, not just for moral and ethical reasons, but as a critical component for business viability.”
Mark founded ESG Today following a 20 year career in investment management and research. Prior to founding ESG Today, Mark worked at Delaney Capital Management (DCM) in Toronto, Canada, most recently as the firm’s head of U.S. equities. While at DCM, Mark was part of the firm’s ESG team, responsible for evaluating and tracking the sustainability factors impacting portfolio companies, and assessing the suitability of companies for portfolio inclusion. Mark also spent several years in the sell-side research industry, covering the technology and services sectors. Mark holds an MBA from Columbia University in New York, a BBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, and is a CFA charterholder.
