Making sustainability data work in your IT landscape

Why sustainability data is a systems challenge

As Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) lead digital transformation, sustainability data is becoming part of the picture, whether through green IT targets, regulatory reporting, or enabling product teams to meet environmental goals. Yet, many infrastructures weren’t built with sustainability in mind.

As KPMG and Microsoft note, organizations face challenges in generating measurable data across the value chain, often due to immature data strategies and siloed systems. Common challenges include:

1. Governance and transparency. Who owns the data, and how traceable is it?
2. Alignment with digital strategy. Does sustainability data flow through the same systems and controls?
3. A single, reliable data source. Do we have one foundation that integrates across various systems?

These are more than process questions – they reflect how data structures influence the scalability and impact of sustainability efforts. For technology leaders, it’s an opportunity to contribute through expertise in systems, data, and governance.

Enabling traceability through proactive governance

From Excel files on shared drives to black-box carbon calculators and siloed PLM/ERP systems, sustainability data often lives in disconnected places. IT isn’t always involved early in sustainability tool selection, yet is often tasked with scaling or integrating them later.

This leads to friction: sustainability teams need agility and access, while IT teams need reliability and control. Without alignment, data is duplicated and difficult to trace. Governance becomes reactive rather than strategic.

CTOs know that when metrics can’t be traced back to source models or verified for consistency, they create risk. Like financial data, sustainability metrics need auditability, clear definitions, and trusted sources. Transparency must be built into the system from the start.

Disconnected tooling delays progress and increases maintenance costs. Worse, it can introduce operational and reputational risks. Effective governance helps organizations avoid these pitfalls and scale sustainability efforts with confidence.

Aligning with your enterprise architecture

When sustainability data is managed outside your digital strategy, it can duplicate work and lack quality assurance. A single, trusted source, governed and integrated from the start, ensures that sustainability data is as usable as any enterprise information asset.

For technology leaders building out data lakes or harmonizing across cloud environments, it’s time to ask:

• Can sustainability metrics be governed like other enterprise data?
• Is the data architecture future-ready, with transparent APIs?
• How traceable are the datasets that feed into decision-making?

If sustainability tools don’t fit your enterprise architecture, they become barriers, not enablers. And in a world moving fast toward AI-driven decision support, embedding sustainability in your broader digital infrastructure is becoming a new standard.

One platform for consistent, traceable data

A central source of sustainability truth, shared across teams and systems, minimizes duplication and builds trust. When well governed, it can feed PLM, ERP, business reporting, and more, ensuring all metrics are rooted in the same, traceable foundation.

Tools like SimaPro cloud are designed with this mindset, supporting collaborative workflows that connect sustainability data with your broader digital ecosystem. In practice, this kind of integration is already helping companies embed sustainability into tools like CPQ systems, where product data and impact need to work side by side. For organizations embedding sustainability into their data architecture, this type of integration-ready platform can help build consistency without adding unnecessary complexity.

A CTO’s opportunity to lead the shift

Sustainability data is a shared responsibility, and IT leaders are well-positioned to make it work. With the right governance and integration, sustainability becomes a reliable part of the company’s digital backbone.

CTOs can lead by making integration a priority, challenging black-box tools, and asking the hard questions about data quality, traceability, and long-term fit.