Will Richardson explains why big companies can't accurately measure their carbon footprint: the data lives in scattered places—spreadsheets, email, vendor databases, energy bills, travel systems. Pulling it together manually is slow, expensive, and full of errors, so the numbers are outdated before they're even finished.
You can't see the data you actually need. Your carbon footprint lives in a spreadsheet. Someone's been updating it manually for 3 years. It connects to your finance system by email. Your supply chain data is scattered across 5 different vendor databases. Your energy bills are in a folder. Your travel data is in another system entirely. This isn't incompetence. This is what happens in every large organisation. Data is everywhere. Pulling it together is slow, expensive, and error-prone. By the time your team has assembled the numbers, another quarter has gone past and the data is already out of date.
