Is complexity the hidden cost of going green?
Customer Example
Schneider Electric
Global sustainability regulations and targets are changing every year – does increased sustainability necessarily translate to increased complexity?
Globally, a host of organisations are pursuing Net Zero as a matter of urgency, setting ambitious near-term targets that get harder to achieve with each passing day. But aside from the big challenges involved in transferring large and complicated organisations from carbon emitters to consumers of renewable energy, some have found that the transition itself brings an unexpected extra dimension of difficulty.
Instead of simplifying their operations, sometimes the changes seem to make processes more muddled. In trying to become cleaner and more transparent, they risk layering new systems on top of older ones, in doing so reducing flexibility, adding new protocols and processes, and decelerating decision-making.
Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy and automation solutions, actively addressed this challenge and, together with Fujitsu, delivered one of the world’s largest ServiceNow ITOM deployments. Through this partnership, Schneider Electric not only reduced the complexity of its global IT landscape but also achieved significant improvements in efficiency, while its sustainability progress continued in parallel
Does the green transition complicate business?
Efficiency is one obvious path to sustainability, and efficiency requires simplicity, but it is not universally true that going green simplifies business. Some organisations can perform the conjuring trick of making processes leaner and smarter as well as more sustainable, while others discover that adding dashboards, reporting platforms and audit chains makes everything a little more intricate.
Data from research provider BARC goes a step further, showing some organisations are overwhelmed by data sources, while others worry about the quality or reliability of data, potentially making decisions less – not more – clear. In its latest State of ESG & Sustainability Reporting research (2025), BARC found that 42% of organisations “lack the resources” to deal with reporting effectively, while the same number found dealing with multiple data sources a challenge. In other words, the very task of proving sustainability can become one of its greatest obstacles.
For many businesses, the simple shift from voluntary to compulsory ESG reporting introduces complexity. There are new modules to be integrated, data reconciled and time spent on generating insight. It’s not always plain sailing; ironically, becoming more sustainable can make the job of running a business less so.
In 2025, numerous companies published statements under the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and other jurisdictions began adopting the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB) reporting framework.
This regulatory shift has led to challenges in aligning ESG strategies across different global cultures and industry sectors, establishing benchmarks for ESG compliance and reporting, and integrating ESG into corporate culture and risk management.
Research by PwC involving around 500 global companies shows more than half report that pressure has increased - internally and externally - to provide sustainability data and insights. Just one in ten said it had decreased.
The complexity tariff
Left unchecked, complexity drains resources: teams to maintain integrations, fixes for data mismatches, adjustments and upgrades. It’s an overhead that can slow the smooth functioning of a business, creating a brake on strategy and innovation – even creating risk.
But if complexity is a hidden drag, what’s the solution? It’s a tricky question to answer, but it involves high-performing teams, elegant technology and a strong, easy-to-follow plan.
Organisations that take a thorough approach will map their systems involved in operations, reporting and governance to understand the various overlaps, blind spots and bottlenecks.
That sheds light on legacy systems that no longer deliver value and hints at what should be retired or consolidated. The tools that replace them should conform to interoperable data standards so that modules consolidate, not conflict.
A roadmap to a clearer picture
With unified data at their fingertips, leaders of these organisations can make trade-offs: whether to decommission infrastructure, merge functions or automate workflows – all grounded in clear and comprehensive strategic insight.
In an illustration of the point, McKinsey reports that telecoms operators can reduce energy costs by between 15% and 30% if they combine analytics, technology shifts and operational levers.
Clearly, those gains rely on an organisation’s ability to transform with coordination and alignment. In cases where systems are disjointed or less well managed, improvements can stall and gains evaporate.
In many cases, organisations are advised adopt a pilot-first approach: taking a domain (a factory, business unit or IT segment), simplifying its architecture, unifying data flows and demonstrating how this all cuts cost, increases agility or reduces reliance on resources.
The lessons learned can then be expanded and implemented throughout the organisation.
As mentioned earlier, Schneider Electric faced the challenge of managing complexity _while it was also progressing its sustainability goals. By applying a pilot-first approach—initially testing and then scaling a unified platform in partnership with Fujitsu—Schneider Electric was able to drastically reduce the complexity of its IT infrastructure. The company achieved 90% ticket accuracy and shortened average incident resolution time by 50% in the first year. Additionally, transparency across all global infrastructures and services was significantly increased, supporting broader operational goals, including sustainability.
If complexity is a hidden tax on sustainability, the antidote must be clarity. To make sustainability scalable, firms need better visibility: across IT, operations, energy sources and supplier networks. This encourages consistent standards, unified data models and governance over piecemeal solutions.
Businesses don’t necessarily need more dashboards and complicated arrangements of data points and analytics, but integrated, unified systems built for robust data pipelines and automated actions.
What’s next?
Organisations are likely to find sustainability easier to manage as reporting standards become more compatible and technology evolves. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has introduced a machine‑readable sustainability taxonomy to make disclosures more comparable and easier to analyse across frameworks such as ISSB and ESRS, reducing the effort needed to interpret and reconcile different requirements. It aims to streamline reporting and support broader interoperability of sustainability data. Global Reporting Initiative
AI‑enabled platforms are already transforming how companies handle sustainability data. Tools that combine data collection, validation and automated reporting can cut data processing time significantly and boost accuracy compared with manual methods. One analysis shows AI platforms can reduce data processing time by up to 40% and increase report accuracy by around 30% through anomaly detection and real‑time validation. Neo.eco
Market adoption of unified digital sustainability platforms, such as systems that connect ESG metrics across finance, operations and supply chains, is increasing because they help companies meet multiple standards such as ISSB and CSRD simultaneously without managing separate processes. This reduces admin time and helps teams focus on performance improvement rather than paperwork.
By centralising data and using automated workflows, organisations will be better positioned to act on insights, track progress and share verified sustainability metrics with investors and regulators, making sustainability reporting clearer and faster.
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