Successful patterns in corporate social responsibility in information technologies

Abstract

In order to show their compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility 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 neither common metrics nor process to assess the efficiency of a sustainability 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 based on their annual turnover. In order to extract sustainability patterns that are provided in an online catalog in order to (1) give first tracks to companies which would engage in sustainability initiatives and don’t 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. The final outcomes of the thesis are a set of 21 patterns extracted from the CSR referenced in an online catalog.