Digitalisation and Sustainability: Decisions That Matter

Cora SRL is a consultancy based in Bistrița, Romania, working with small businesses and local public institutions on digitalisation, financing, cybersecurity and digital skills. For most of the small businesses we assist, sustainability first enters the discussion when a customer or bank requests information the company has not previously collected.

Rather than treating these requests as an isolated reporting exercise, we address them alongside the firm’s digital practices, including the environmental implications of its technology choices.

Assessing green digitalisation

Our company uses the European Commission’s open Digital Maturity Assessment questionnaire, which includes green digitalisation among its six dimensions. It examines both how digital technologies can reduce a company’s environmental impact and whether environmental considerations influence its own digital choices, including procurement, equipment reuse and energy consumption.

The questionnaire provides a starting point, rather than proof of a particular environmental outcome. We supplement the self-declared answers by examining the applications actually used, licence invoices and existing working practices.

We also establish who is responsible for particular decisions before preparing a report and a roadmap that set out the proposed actions, responsibilities and prerequisites.

What an equipment inventory misses

An equipment inventory shows which devices a company owns, but provides little information about the decisions governing their use. A company’s data-retention policy, for example, may reflect its software provider’s default settings, without anyone having considered how long the information needs to be kept.

Similarly, replacing an existing computer with a more energy-efficient model requires consideration of the environmental costs of manufacturing new equipment against the benefits of extending its useful life, as discussed by the European Environment Agency

Another consideration is the rebound effect, whereby improvements in efficiency can encourage additional consumption, potentially offsetting some of the expected savings. A digital solution that makes a process faster or cheaper does not necessarily reduce its overall environmental impact if it also leads to more frequent use.

These examples suggest that digital sustainability assessments should also examine the decisions governing how digital technologies are used.

Skills and responsibilities

Addressing these considerations also requires employees to understand the environmental implications of decisions that would otherwise be treated as routine IT or administrative matters.

Procurement, software configuration and data management may involve different employees or external IT providers, with no one necessarily responsible for considering these decisions together.

For example, reviewing an equipment replacement cycle is of limited use unless someone can establish purchasing criteria, maintain an equipment register and decide when repair is preferable. The same applies to data-retention rules: the business must decide what it needs, and whoever administers its software must know how to implement that decision.

In our assessments, we identify which existing organisational roles are responsible for these decisions and consider what competences they may need, with European frameworks such as DigComp and GreenComp
providing useful reference points.

The findings can then inform recommendations for targeted training, changes to internal procedures or investments for which we can provide financing assistance.

A small business may have neither the resources nor the need for a dedicated digital sustainability specialist, but this does not remove the need for informed decisions about procurement, configuration and resource consumption.

We therefore believe that assigning clear responsibilities and developing the relevant competences can help businesses better align their practices with their sustainability objectives.