Why do young adults find it so hard to communicate with their elders? And why do they think there’s such a big generation gap between themselves and adults — a perception that often leads to mistrust, alienation and anti-social behavior?

Such questions may be as difficult to answer as, “How do I increase productivity while cutting my budget by 20%?” But if you want to put these points directly to youngsters, and take in their views, you can do so, courtesy of O2, the trading company of mobile comms giant Telefónica Europe, which has created an online platform (hosted on Facebook, naturally) with the express aim of “helping adults to understand young people a bit better.”

The project, called “Why Do,” was not the idea of anyone at O2; neither was it cooked up by a marketing agency partner looking for an easy PR win. Rather it was the brainchild of Sabian Muhammad, a 22-year-old youth worker from a deprived area of London. It is just one example of O2’s “Think Big” initiative, which helps young people to develop ideas and programs that benefit the communities they live in. O2 supplies funding, employee expertise, training and practical support to get these projects off the ground, with all of the ideas crowdsourced through a dedicated website.

The project is just one of O2’s series of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, revolving around community projects and environmental responsibility; and they’re happening not because the company has suddenly been infused with a passion for Bill Gates-style philanthropy, but because this move makes sound business sense.

Think Big, for example, was instigated in response to a survey of O2 customers, which indicated that they expect the company to make a positive difference to society by using the power of its brand — and the profits those same customers help create.

“Our customers wanted us to enable change, not just slap our brand on a charity initiative,” says Bill Eyres, head of sustainability at O2 and responsible for the company’s broad CSR activities. “And the one issue they told us they were really concerned about was young people becoming disconnected from their communities.”

Everyone’s a winner

Of course, it’s clear that for a mobile network operator like O2, linking its brand in a positive way with communities of young people is a smart business move. And Eyres, whose résumé includes CSR leadership roles at ethically driven enterprises such as The Body Shop and Co-Operative Bank, is proud to acknowledge the win-win nature of the policy.

He fully buys into the business case for “strategic CSR” first made four years ago by world-renowned competitiveness guru and Harvard professor Michael Porter, when he argued: “CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint or a charitable deed — it can be a source of opportunity, innovation and competitive advantage.”

Eyres has been instrumental in O2’s adoption of this kind of thinking, trying to ensure that any truly valuable CSR initiative the company undertakes is closely aligned with business goals. Again echoing Porter’s views, he makes a fundamental point: “The most successful businesses will be ones that truly incorporate social and environmental responsibility into their strategy.

“In a period of social disruption and growing unemployment [in many economies], we must recognize that a business can’t be an island cut off from the communities in which it operates. There is a huge range of skills that everyone has in business that we can offer to local communities.”

It is essential to embed this kind of responsible thinking in everything the organization does, from the boardroom to the shop floor, argues Eyres. And the CIO has a major role to play not only in setting the tone in the IT organization, but in identifying and championing technologies and practices that underpin, drive and support CSR initiatives in the organization — and in wider society.

PR guru Lord Tim Bell, chairman of global marketing and reputation management conglomerate Chime Communications (and renowned as “Margaret Thatcher’s PR man” when she was UK prime minister) concurs — with the proviso that profitable business is a prerequisite to CSR. “You need to be seen to be a force for good,” he says. “But you need to be a financial success first — it’s not just about good intentions, it’s about being able to do something.”

However, there is plenty of evidence that the converse can also be true: that CSR can lead to financial success, and that many smart businesses have realized this. Bell points to where the priorities now lie in times of scarcity: “During the recession, as companies stopped spending on advertising, public relations and marketing, they didn’t stop spending on CSR. In fact, CSR budgets went up.” The CSR business he co-directs, Corporate Citizenship, a global consultancy on strategic corporate responsibility, doubled its profits last year, he says.

Transparency driving accountability

But just as there is an attractive upside to having a successful CSR strategy, there is a huge downside to not having one, or failing to implement one successfully. “External stakeholders are seeking to hold companies accountable for social issues,” warned Michael Porter back in 2006. “[There are] potentially large financial risks for any firm whose conduct is deemed unacceptable.”

This is, of course, a painful lesson that many organizations in recent years — from the oil industry to the banking sector — have learned through bitter experience.

What’s more, in an age where social networking, blogs and wikis are ubiquitous, like it or not, organizations are having to deal with the expectation of much greater transparency being set by both internal and external stakeholders. Advocacy groups increasingly gather and monitor intelligence on the activities of large organizations, so if companies fail to implement processes to capture, analyze and communicate information about their own impact on society — positive or negative — someone, somewhere is likely to do it for them, and broadcast it to the world.

Josh Bernoff, a senior vice president at analyst firm Forrester Research and co-author of the highly influential Web 2.0 business books Groundswell and Empowered, believes 100% responsible behavior is now the only way to deal with the kind of pressure this generates. “If you are behaving in a way that doesn’t live up to ethical scrutiny, then sooner or later it’s going to catch up with you,” he argues.

“Suppose everyone can see everything that you can see now, and they saw a particular decision that you made: would you still feel good about it? That’s the way corporations need to act. I’m not suggesting that companies should reveal everything, but they do need to behave in such a way that, if everything were revealed, they could defend the position they’ve taken.”

When, in 2006, Siemens was caught up in a bribery scandal, it actively embraced transparency to restore its tarnished reputation. The German engineering technology giant quickly realized that to create a sustainable business for the future it had to implement — and be seen to implement — a set of world-class corporate compliance processes to create watertight accountability and ensure such a scandal could never rock the company again.

“Siemens is very proud of its technology and history,” says Mark Gough, deputy head of compliance investigations at Siemens AG. “And the allegations relating to that corruption scandal, of course, harmed its image.” So the compliance program was quickly established as part of a process of internal change, he explains, “to get our reputation back.”

A key part of this involves, as Gough puts it, “adding the integrity component to an employee’s responsibilities.” This means ensuring every single person in the company, from the board down, is imbued with the company’s new mantra: Clean Business Only. “We want people of the highest standards of integrity, who believe in our values,” says Gough. “[If they do,] there will be much less of a problem about misconduct. To get people to fully buy into the values is a difficult job, but if we continue to promote the tone from the top, the message will sink in.”

But there is also a bottom-up approach: any of the company’s 400,000 employees has the freedom to ring alarm bells with compliance officers, in the certainty that they will not suffer negative consequences. “If you want a transparent organization, you’ve got to have the ability for staff to feel free to report wrongdoing and know their career will not be harmed in any way,” says Gough.

Call to action for CIOs

As demonstrated by the example of O2, a successful CSR strategy can go much further than just requiring employees to act responsibly — and IT has a crucial role to play in this. For example, automotive manufacturers like Volvo and Ford (Volvo’s parent company until August 2010) are leveraging their in-car technology to enhance “active safety” — or, in other words, accident prevention.

Because vast amounts of data, containing information about what a car is doing, are now being transmitted in real time from vehicles to manufacturers via the cloud (for more on this, see our Case Study), it will soon be possible to warn public authorities about potential hazards on roads.

“If we have a server that’s looking through that data and it sees there’s a specific location in a city where our customers’ anti-lock brakes are going off right now, we can send the information to public agencies to warn that there’s probably something wrong on the road,” explains Rich Strader, who was on temporary assignment from Ford to Volvo as CIO until the end of 2010.

“And the key thing there is that it isn’t giving back just to Volvo or Ford owners. It’s giving back to everybody.”

Reducing carbon emissions is another area of CSR that figures big for IT — and not just emissions from vehicles in the automotive industry. “We can help reduce emissions from everything in the entire supply chain that we use to manufacture a vehicle,” says Strader. And of course, that can also lead to greater efficiency, creating business benefits not only in terms of public reputation, but also cost reduction. “The aim is to make our operations as smooth as possible. When you do that you eliminate a lot of [redundant] activity, and all activity results in emissions and cost.”

Environmental sustainability is core to virtually every organization’s CSR policy — and ICT is mission-critical to that, says Alison O’Flynn Rowe, global executive director of sustainability at Fujitsu. “The ICT industry has the potential to reduce global emissions by 25% by 2020 through technology solutions,” she says.

“The CIO has an exciting leadership role to play in this. He or she is the key to designing, managing and integrating ICT into every aspect of the business and the wider business — that is, suppliers, partners and customers — to reduce emissions and improve overall efficiency.” (See also Fujitsu’s Green IT survey results.)

Beyond green IT

However, ICT’s role in CSR goes way beyond the green agenda, argues O2’s Eyres, a prime exponent of the role it can play in how companies give back to society. “We know that in a lot of different ways social media, and ICT generally, can help to bring societies and communities together,” he says.

Added to this, he claims, technology-driven ingenuity and innovation are vital, too. “It’s about looking at social and environmental issues and asking, ‘How can we bring our technology to bear on this?’” But he raises a caveat for CIOs: “It’s not just about technology — it’s technology plus people. The big question is: How do we develop solutions that will engage people and motivate them to make a difference?”

And the prospect of ICT making a difference, and creating added value for every aspect of the enterprise, including its CSR initiatives — which are becoming increasingly deeply embedded — is exactly what gets ambitious CIOs out of bed in the morning.

Further information:
• 94% of CSR executives say support from senior managers is the most important ingredient in a successful CSR program. (Weber Shandwick Social Impact Survey, 2010)
• Podcast on the Siemens compliance program, produced by the Cambridge Judge Business School.
• Highlights of keynote speeches on CSR by Bill Eyres and Lord Bell.