Juergen Sommer

Sustainable Business Development and IT Sustainability is one of my core values – since ever. Spending 30plus years of my professional career in various leadership roles in the ICT industry, I decided in 2021 to learn more about sustainability in business and tried to figure out how to apply these learnings in my daily business development work. According to researchers of the Lancaster University ICT’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions could be around 2.1-3.9%. This is greater than the aviation industry, which are around 2 % of global emissions. So, ICT is part of the problem, but part of the solution as well. ICT itself has many opportunities to reduce its own carbon footprint (Scope 1 and 2) and ICT solutions can help business and consumer to reduce their CO2 emissions (Scope 3). Therefore, my first expert area is ‘sustainable business development’, to help companies introduce sustainable business models to create sustainable product/services portfolios to gain a competitive advantage in the eco system and market. The second expert area is ‘sustainable IT’. With that I help companies to become more energy efficient in their ICT areas to reduce the carbon footprint and subsequently associated cost. However, beside the E-nvironmental pillar in the ESG model– environmental, there is the S-ocial pillar as well. This people focusing aspect is key to any successful transformation, especially for such a big one as the sustainability journey.

Work Experience

I can summarize all my 30plus years leadership work in the ICT industry with two words: transformation and change. Technically from host to client-server to cloud architectures. From monolithic applications in the data center to digital cloud native apps on the edge. On the business side from product to solution to services. Process-Technology-People, during the last decade in the SAP area. And now from the linear economy, take-make-use-waste, to a circular economy.