Buddhist monk in a zen garden

Many important economic, environmental, and social issues affect individual businesses and the global community. The challenge for companies is to identify and prioritize issues that will have a significant substantive influence on the assessments and decisions of internal decision makers and that will significantly contribute to the sustainability of the business. At Cisco our approach to identifying trends, defining emerging issues, and prioritizing these issues has three components:

  • Industry-Level Collaboration and Materiality Evaluation: Review issues common to the IT industry and partner with industry peers to define how emerging issues affect typical IT business models.
  • Company-Level Business Continuity and Materiality Evaluation: Responsibly evaluate and manage risks. Assess an issue’s impact to the company’s operations, business models, and strategic plan.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Check and recheck priorities, recommendations, findings, and potential actions with stakeholders.

Industry-Level Collaboration on CSR Issues

Cisco is active in a variety of industrywide groups focused on finding practical means to address CSR issues that affect the IT industry and global community. Two groups that have deepened our understanding of stakeholder perspectives and provided turnkey solutions are the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) and the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) Supply Chain working group.

Cisco is a board member of GeSI, an initiative of IT companies aimed at furthering sustainable development in the IT sector. We actively participate on the GeSI board, as well as with the Climate Change, Materiality, and Supply Chain working groups, whose aims are to develop common industry practices and shared solutions where appropriate.

Cisco and Telefonica cochair the GeSI Materiality working group, which has the overall objective of identifying key issues of material concern regarding the IT sector as identified by GeSI members, other IT companies, investment analysts, civil society groups, and other stakeholders. The research activities of this work group take into account the contribution of CSR reporting frameworks and thought leadership from the Global Reporting Initiative, Millennium Development Goals, literature review, and an inventory of best practices. The working group plans to delineate how common CSR issues may uniquely affect IT industry subsectors such as consumer electronics, service providers, and Internet and equipment manufacturers, and the group offers guidelines to unify reporting of material issues to stakeholders.

The ultimate goal of this project is to help IT companies better support their own materiality processes, refine sustainability reporting and strategies, and help investment analysts understand the issues considered most material to companies in the IT sector.

Cisco has been a member of the EICC almost since its inception in 2004, and is currently a member of the group’s Steering Committee. In addition, Cisco chairs the Joint Audit Work Group, which is charged with planning and facilitating the collaborative audits of shared suppliers. In this role, Cisco works with other IT companies to develop tools and guidelines to ensure the audits are comprehensive, consistent, and compliant with the intent of the Code of Conduct. More details may be found in the Supply Chain section of this report.