Companies in general are establishing sustainability commitments and strategies that touch across all parts of a business. To stay accountable, they should measure, track, and report on progress against those objectives, internally and externally. This may not be an easy task, and it can be complex. Translating a sustainability strategy into execution, and demonstrating its progress, demands an integrated and cross-functional organizational construct to drive change, and help an organization stick to its goals.

Think about reporting and performance management: many functions have to do data collection and metrics calculation, and those functions are responsible for performance monitoring. But when it comes to achieving a common goal, like sustainability, those responsibilities can become a lot harder. Reporting on greenhouse gas emissions, employee metrics, environmental effects on supply chains, and energy consumption of business travel and office buildings—and a whole lot more—add up to evidence of an organization’s sustainability goals, strategies, and accomplishments. Sustainability reporting can come from all over the organization, and organizations may not have done a data audit or metrics prioritization. And yet another challenge: as regulatory environments evolve, sustainability reporting expectations are often not prescriptive, which adds another layer of complexity.

To lead and support sustainability reporting and performance management, organizations should consider a sustainability command center, a centralized hub that coordinates across metric definitions, data collection, reporting, tracking, and monitoring of performance—with finance at the helm. With this command center construct, finance can drive integrated approaches to their enterprise’s sustainability initiatives, institute clear guardrails for data governance, and help inspire, enable, and guide decision making across the organization. It’s not a center of excellence (COE) that builds specialized expertise in a single function; instead, it’s a coordinating body that takes an organization’s sustainability strategy and executes it through cooperation and cross-functional collaboration, desiloing work, and providing true pluralistic perspectives across the organization.

Think of a space launch: the command center gathers people across disciplines with a common goal, and helps break down barriers, speeds up decision making and actions, allows for quick pivots and analyses, and keeps everyone connected to execute the mission. The individuals own their processes, but the command center — and its lead — provide direction, pull people together, keep things moving and focused, and enable the mission. Similarly, this is where finance can play a key role and increase its ability and visibility as a strategic business partner for the organization, enabling sustainability goals while keeping a close eye on the bottom line. With a sustainability command center, everyone can keep their eye on the mission while keeping communication open, governance clear and accountable, and collaboration constant. While a sustainability COE or working group can set the mission, the sustainability command center can make sure the mission is accomplished.

A sustainability command center’s responsibilities could involve managing and coordinating sustainability reporting and performance management activities across the organization, which may reduce potential duplication and drive consistency and standardization. And when it comes to metrics, those standards and reduced redundancies are vital: while the metrics of greenhouse gas emissions may be owned by operations, and employee turnover metrics are watched over by human resources, a centralized command center with a clear lead can help ensure the reporting on the metrics is coordinated, consistent, and aligned to an organization’s overall strategy.

Finance isn’t responsible for building out new capabilities for sustainability, such as human resources and greenhouse gas calculations. We’re suggesting that, instead, finance be considered as the function that convenes these existing capabilities into something new, desiloed, and forward-looking, and acts as the glue that sustains their connection.

The sustainability command center would also provide standards and coordinate collection, monitor performance, and provide insight back to the business on alignment to sustainability strategy and progress toward goals. It’s a mechanism for collaboration and stakeholder engagement, a coordinated approach to technology and automation, and provides constant alignment to and assessment of the organization’s overall sustainability strategy. The bottom line: a sustainability command center knows how to get things done—and can bring the organization into the future while it works.

It’s simple: finance has done this before and has the skills. When you build a command center, you want a steady hand at the helm. That’s finance:

• They have the responsibility to meet external reporting requirements and (typically) have the responsibility to track/report on organizational performance against sustainability strategy (so tighter alignment between strategy and reporting/tracking)
• They are already trusted business partners and work across the organization
• They have skills and experience in data management, analysis, and performance management (may require upskilling/working with functions to understand non-financial metrics)

Organizations love their data but organizing and managing it can be difficult. When it comes to sustainability reporting and metrics, data quality is key to a successful mission. Enter the sustainability command center, which can play a pivotal role in driving data quality and governance and coordinating the activities needed to mature data quality.

Consider these goals:

• Align KPIs, hierarchies, and definitions with accountabilities and defined reporting views to tell an organization’s sustainability story.
• Build data initiatives that bridge gaps in availability, quantity, and quality.
• Build ambition for your data: what do you need it to do when it comes to telling your organization’s sustainability story?
• Build a blueprint: Where does your data come from, where is it housed, and how can it be augmented to support internal reporting requirements? Can automated technologies give you better, faster visibility into that data?
• Build defined data governance and collection frameworks to identify potential flaws and improvement opportunities.