Enablon’s Wizness Marries Sustainability with Social Network

By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research

Things continue to pop in the enterprise sustainability arena. Now, we’re seeing the emergence of enterprise social networking tools for furthering sustainability initiatives.

Enablon, a leader and ten-year veteran in corporate sustainability solutions, recently launched a social network platform called Wizness (wise business) in an effort to respond to customer requests for industry-wide collaboration on sustainability issues.

Wizness is a social networking platform that seeks to help companies promulgate and share information on sustainability issues throughout their supply chains. It includes company-specific profiles that can be created and managed to filter news-based content around sustainability. It also includes expert communities on a variety of sustainability topics, forums for sharing best practices, and the ability to track metrics on a company’s sustainability performance. In addition, Wizness provides a way for content and service providers in the sustainability market to interact with companies practicing sustainability, and offer their expertise and content.

Sustainability is not only an individual company issue. Rather, it is a complex issue that impacts an entire industry. Companies have come to realize that businesses have more to gain by collaborating with their peers regarding sustainability rather than trying to do it all themselves. Sharing vendor sustainability data with other companies in the same supply chain is an example of how collaboration can help organizations leverage their competencies and improve sustainability throughout an industry.

Communication with peers within an industry is a start toward deriving benefits, but collaboration is even better, and that is what Wizness seeks to achieve. Engaging in a dialogue with partners in a supply chain will ultimately lead to greater value for a company and its partners. Wizness currently has more than 250 member companies participating, and it provides both public and private collaboration capabilities. Companies within an industry can create private areas to share documents and information with their employees or partners, and determine what content they want to share publicly.

Currently, Wizness is an open platform, and does not yet provide tight integration with Enablon’s sustainability solutions. Future versions will include that integration, resulting in companies being able to add Wizness as a social layer on top of Enablon.

Upside Research believes that Wizness is a brilliant idea for furthering sustainability efforts within a specific industry. The key challenge to its success will be for Enablon to attract the key thought leaders in the various topic areas of sustainability to participate in the Wizness communities, and share best practices and information about industry-specific initiatives. Without critical mass, Wizness will not offer companies practicing sustainability enough incentive to continue to actively participate. And, while it will be a benefit for Enablon customers to link directly to their internal sustainability platforms, it may be more important for the ultimate success of Wizness to maintain its vendor neutrality to attract and retain the industry leading sustainability experts.