Beyond the mist – TRIRIGA and Envizi – Part 1

This year, a lot is being said and done regarding sustainability obligations, opportunities, etc., driven by UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (link for SDGs) specifying multiple goals to be achieved by Countries by 2030.

The UN SDGs were grouped into tangible areas where we could apply a combined sustained effort. This grouping led to the emergence of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) areas which are now becoming a de-facto benchmark for assessing companies on their environmental and social responsibilities through their operations and supply chain. 

UN Sustainable Development Goals

A mapping of SDGs into ESG buckets was done by Berenberg in their ESG office study titled “Understanding the SDGs in sustainable investing”

ESG Buckets

The UN is tracking the progress on the SDG parameters and publishes the yearly progress report (link for 2022 report)

(link to infographics)

So why are we talking about the UN’s SDGs and the ESG in general?

There is a greater emphasis and peer pressure for companies to act quickly and efficiently on ESG goals. The ESG is also being used as a benchmark for future investment initiatives. The Environmental “E” in the ESG is quite close to the Facilities Management industry as a whole and close to TRIRIGA in the shape of one of the core application towers within the solution.

TRIRIGA took environmental and sustainability to a level where companies can collect specific data points to track the progress, package the data, transmit it to energy performance rating partners, and achieve the energy performance ratings against the buildings.

The overall ESG framework is quite vast, and there was a need for some other “thing” to cover the entire paradigm of ESG. This solution must handle the complexities of ingesting data from disparate data sources, be able to normalise the data, allow reporting and trend analysis, and package the data ready for consumption by different ESG reporting frameworks.

Enter “Envizi”, a new kid on the IBM block. The acquisition of Envizi changed the landscape of the sustainability solution footprint for IBM. However, this also meant for consultants like us; we now must figure out the Envizi jigsaw puzzle and line up the ducks for TRIRIGA and Envizi.

IBM team is coming up with multiple initiatives promoting the concepts of Environmental Intelligence Suite, Sustainability Software, and very hot of the press – Strategic Real Estate Asset Management (STREAM), each with a flavour of TRIRIGA and Envizi paired with other solutions.

Away from all this marketing blitz, we still need to figure it out, make sense of the solution components, and map it all with the business benefits for our customers and their use cases. So, I’ve embarked on a journey to see beyond the mist and unravel the ways and means of how TRIRIGA and Envizi can work together to provide better value to the Facilities Management industry as a whole and, in particular, for the existing TRIRIGA customers.

Thank you for making it through the post, and hopefully, this gives you a background of what ESG is, why everyone is talking about it, and what we can do about ESG with TRIRIGA and Envizi solutions.

In my future posts, I shall cover business use cases and technical solutions related to a joint TRIRIGA and Envizi solution framework.

To continue reading, please click here for Part 2 of this article series.