A Big Data Analytics-Based Methodology For Social Sustainability Impacts Evaluation: A Case Study

Abstract

Nowadays, Big Data (BD) technology is considered by institutions, enterprises and governments a primary key to addressing sustainability challenges. The business ecosystem is becoming more and more complicated, due to large and strong interactions between the directly involved stakeholders such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers on one hand, and the indirect stakeholders such as the environment and society on the other hand. Thus, moving toward corporate sustainability requires an accurate understanding of these business partners’ impacts on each other. Indeed, enterprises must incorporate the three sustain-ability dimensions to assess a product, a service, or process performance on environmental, economic, and social aspects. To this end, this paper presents a big data analytics (BDA) based methodology to analyze the social sustainability impacts of enterprises. Besides, a real-life case study from the database proposed by the impact-weighted account project (IWAP) team at Harvard business school, is used to validate the methodology. The obtained results show the added value of using BDA technology to achieve enterprises’ social Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda launched by the United Nations.