An Analysis of Best Practice Patterns for Corporate Social Responsibility in Top IT Companies

Abstract

In order to show their compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals, companies report their “sustainable initiatives” into their CSR reports. However, from small companies to multinational, it is hard to see the real benefits of sustainable strategies’ implementation, since there are actually no general patterns defined which can ensure high impacts on sustainability. Moreover, there are few metrics and process to assess the efficiency of a sustainability strategy, but the different studies made in that field can show different results, this induces a part of uncertainty to evaluate the performance of a sustainable strategy. Therefore, in this paper, we contribute a pattern approach to implementing sustainability in a company. To do that, we performed an analysis of the 25 CSR reports coming from the 25 biggest companies in the IT sector in order to extract sustainability patterns that are provided in an online catalog to (1) give first tracks to companies which would engage in sustainability initiatives and do not really know where to start; and (2) to give an indicator to companies who already have taken up sustainability initiatives and would like to establish an evaluation of it.

Keywords

• sustainability
• corporate social responsibility
• patterns
• industry
• IT
• sustainable strategies