Teaching Old Products New Tricks
Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is a significant emerging trend in today’s business world. You know it’s arrived when The Economist devotes a 14-page section to it.
CSR can express itself in many ways. For instance, it may be a desire to reduce a company’s carbon footprint. Or a commitment to improving the communities where a company does business. Or a commitment to fair trade, fair labor, or sustainable operations. Increasingly, business leaders recognize a need to lead in areas where governments can’t or won’t.
How can we help? We’ve been thinking about that (and Jeff Frank has been blogging about it at Frankly CSR). One of the things we’re doing is teaching our products some new tricks. For instance:
- Compliance Control Manager – we originally developed CCM to help companies comply with accounting regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley. Lately we’ve realized that we can use CCM to monitor compliance with most any regulations, including the latest environmental regulations.
- Strategic Sourcing – helps agencies acquire the goods and services they need while treating all suppliers equitably. (That’s a good example of CSR right there). We’re now working with a customer to incorporate their extensive fair labor/fair trade/fair sourcing check list into our product. That will help us convert Strategic Sourcing to Sustainable Sourcing.
- Green Dashboard – Lawson Business Intelligence measures things. Why not environmental things? We’re working with customers today to build a Green Dashboard on top of LBI so customers can measure their environmental footprint more precisely and monitor it over time.
CSR doesn’t necessarily require a spate of new applications. It simply requires re-thinking some existing applications. In fact, if you’re a customer of ours, and you own Compliance Control Manager or LBI or Strategic Sourcing, you’re already well on your way to a green solution.
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