Sustainable into the future: Sustainability Report of 2022/23

On January 1, 2024, the EU Commission’s amendment to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will take effect. This will significantly expand the scope of companies that will be subject to sustainability reporting requirements in the future.

Although the company is not currently subject to a statutory reporting obligation, we see voluntary reporting as an opportunity to systematically record the status of this important societal issue as a starting point for making improvements. It also represents an important step in our preparations for the future statutory requirements on sustainabil­ity reporting.

Therefore, this report aims to provide our customers, employees, partners and suppliers and interested members of the public with an initial insight into our approach to sustainability within the company and in our supply chain. Our report provides a transparent overview of the measures that have already been initiated and those that still need to be taken in order to implement our sustainability strategy. Based on a materiality analysis, we report on our company’s sustainability along the three sustainability dimensions of environmental, social and governance (ESG) – both within the company and in cooperation with our customers.

The use of energy-saving technology in our own operations is the biggest lever for making the company more climate-friendly. But it’s not the only one. Our revised travel and mobility policy aims to reduce travel, especially air travel, to a necessary minimum. The gradual conversion of our vehicle fleet to electric vehicles will further reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years.

To compensate for the loss of plant and animal habitats due to land development and use, the company will support species conservation projects such as the bee hives on its own premises. Another pillar of the company’s sustainability strategy is to offset greenhouse gas emissions that the company is currently unable to reduce itself. NTT DATA Business Solutions relies on serious, long-term offset projects such as the reforestation of the Teutoburg Forest or the tree-planting campaign by the trainees of the DSC Arminia Bielefeld as part of the Ostwestfalen alliance, which, for example, will more than offset the greenhouse gas emissions of our SAP partner event TransformationNOW! 2022. A committee of employees decides which projects to support and how much to donate.

Social sustainability actions

The report also covers the working environment of employees in our own company and along the supply chain. As a global company, it is our task to ensure the best possible and fair working conditions and development opportunities at all locations.

As NTT DATA Business Solutions’ field of activity has potential human rights risks, any violation of human rights is met with a zero-tolerance policy. To ensure this, the focus in the 2023/2024 financial year is on the human rights due diligence process.

With regard to working conditions, our report addresses the legal regulation of working hours, occupational health management, the avoidance of bogus self-employment and the handling of contingent workers. Another challenge that affects the entire IT industry is gender equality. By 2028, we aim to increase the proportion of women in our workforce to more than one-third, with a particular focus on senior management. As an additional HR incentive, we have set ourselves the goal of achieving the internationally recognized “Global Top Employer” in 2023.

Sustainable corporate governance

In the area of sustainable corporate governance, we focus on ethics & compliance, data protection & cybersecurity and especially on the responsible use of technology. Protecting infrastructure from cyber attacks and optimizing data management are becoming increasingly urgent as business processes become more digital. The IT systems required for this are also moving towards the cloud. Both aspects – the digitization of processes and the secure and data-protected operation of systems – are key components of our service. The responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI), which is already changing our day-to-day work and our service portfolio, is also becoming increasingly relevant. In terms of social responsibility, dealing with attempts to deceive through deep fakes and ensuring data protection, as well as ethical aspects such as fairness, transparency and traceability, play a particularly important role.

The publication of this report is intended to drive the process of increasingly holistic and sustainable business management. For us, this means making all three ESG criteria an integral part of our business activities – internally and with our stakeholders. In the future, the benchmarks for measuring corporate success must be more diverse and go beyond the dominant financial indicators, without neglecting them. Our global sustainability strategy has been developed since July 2022 as part of a global sustainability program and is still ongoing. In 2023, the goals and KPIs will be finalized and integrated into the Sustainability Report. Our first Sustainability Report can therefore only be a prelude to further annual reports, which are essential for a transparent sustainability strategy.

German Sustainability Code

Our first sustainability report is based on the standards set out in the German Sustainability Code (GSC). In accordance with the requirements of the GSC, we have prepared a declaration of con­formity with 20 criteria contained in the GSC online database. The declaration includes non-financial performance indicators in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

This sustainability report reproduces the content of the GSC dec­laration in a slightly looser structure and supplemented by addi­tional content. The structure and the selection of the additional content of the report are based on our materiality analysis and the identified sustainability aspects for NTT DATA Business Solutions in the areas of environment, social and governance. We believed it was important for us to provide an insight into how we are address­ing each of these three pillars in practice. We achieved this through interviews and project reports.

Materiality analysis

Our sustainability strategy is based on a materiality analysis that is updated annually. We use this to determine the issues of particu­lar relevance to NTT DATA Business Solutions in terms of its sus­tainable transformation. In particular, this is the case where there are significant risks or opportunities in respect of environmental, social or economic aspects that are considered to be critical from the perspective of the company and its stakeholders.

Our most recent materiality analysis identified nine top issues that can be allocated to the three sustainability dimensions, i.e. envi­ronmental, social, and sustainable corporate governance, or ESG for short.

In evaluating the key issues, we take account of the impact of our actions on environmental and social aspects (inside-out perspec­tive) and the impact of sustainability issues on the company (out­side-in perspective).