RINIS enshrines sustainable development targets in strategy

As a public service provider, RINIS Foundation embraces sustainability in the broadest possible sense of the word. “Same as virtually all organisations that work in or for the public sector”, Tom de Jong says. “Only, there is often a substantial gap between embracing sustainability and then actually putting this into practice within your organisation. Which steps do you put in place to incorporate sustainability as a foundational element of your organisation?”

The right man to answer that question is sustainability expert Tom. In September of last year, he took on the role as RINIS Foundation’s Sustainability Quartermaster. “We are a fairly small organisation, which makes it easy to say: what difference does it make what we do, considering what’s going on around the world. You can also turn that statement on its head: being a small IT organisation means we are also adaptable and agile enough to do things differently and to lead by example. Which in turn could mean that the things that turn out to work well serve to inspire other organisations.”

Enthusing employees

To ensure sustainability is a broadly supported topic in any organisation, it is important for all employees to be on board. “Getting there works a lot better when management says: this is what we’ll do from now on”, Tom explains. Which is why he had conversations with every single RINIS team. “The thing that struck me most in these conversations is the enthusiasm with which this topic is met: in all, I picked up 226 ideas to make RINIS more sustainable.” Topics such as mobility, saving energy and technology optimisation jumped to the fore. As such, employees came up with suggestions to further facilitate hybrid working, use servers more efficiently and to critically reassess consumption.

The conversations threw up a twofold ambition: one for sustainable services and one for sustainable employees. Tom: “These ambitions are quite a challenge, especially when it comes to our services, as information security is obviously paramount in our service delivery, plus the innovation of the kind of complex technologies we use in delivering our services is an energy guzzler in its own right.”

The Sustainable Development Goals RINIS takes its cue from

Strategy and vision

Management stresses and fully endorses the importance of sustainability at RINIS. “Incorporating sustainability as part of our strategy sees RINIS take a major first step on the road towards making ourselves a more sustainable outfit”, manager Gino Laan contends. RINIS has also set out new sustainability principles as part of its vision and values, which are in line with seven of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. These goals pursue cooperation through partnerships, making information and communication technology more sustainable and the responsible use of resources and sustainable energy. Serving as an inclusive environment that has its employees’ welfare at heart is also part of these values and endeavours.

Impact measurement

The next step in implementing our sustainability ambitions is to gain an understanding of the current environmental impact of the various sustainability topics. Tom is now working to identify RINIS Foundation’s carbon emissions as well as which materials, resources and how much energy is being used up and down the organisation. “For instance, I’m looking into the kind of hardware and software we source from third parties and how often we replace these. We need to ask ourselves if there are suppliers out there that are more sustainable businesses. And ask the question whether we could use some products for a little longer before we end up replacing them. These are difficult issues, mainly because of the fact that information security and privacy are areas of prime concern in the kind of work we do. Concerns which can be at odds with sustainability.”

The baseline measurement is the jump-off point for concrete actions. “I’ve put together several topical teams and together we are now in the process of investigating in which areas we should be able to drive down our environmental impact. Needless to say we’ll be monitoring the implementation of all schemes and efforts as part of this drive. In the meantime, I’ll keep raising the flag for sustainability right across the organisation. This will help make sustainability a key factor in all of our processes and decisions.”