SoftwareOne case study
UNEP: One planet, one platform
How SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) is helping the United Nations break through siloes in environmental thinking
Sustainability is mission-critical for SoftwareOne and in March 2023, we testified to our commitment on the global stage.
A two-strong team from SoftwareOne had gone from temperatures of -5C° Norway to brave 35°C in Bangkok where they addressed a meeting of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). SoftwareOne had helped develop a collaboration platform for the scientists and researchers who would be compiling UNEP’s Seventh Global Environment Outlook, better known as GEO-7. Hundreds of key contributors had gathered in Thailand to kickstart the project, but they would soon return to their research posts in Montreal and Mombasa, or to ministries in Brasília and Beijing.
The objective of SoftwareOne’s address to the GEO-7 inaugural session was simple enough: to get as many of the authors to sign up to the platform there and then because adoption would be key to its success.
After SoftwareOne’s consultants Pål André Ropstad and Håvard Setra Sørvik had demonstrated some aspects of the Microsoft-based portal and reassured delegates that help with onboarding would be on hand all week, the head of GEO-7, Pierre Boileau, closed the session with the following words, which are worth quoting at length:
“The reason that we put so much effort into trying to create this collaboration platform is because we’ve had several unsuccessful attempts in the past to create collaboration platforms and authors end up … doing things in their own Google Docs directories and we never actually have true collaboration. The chapters are prepared in silos. They’re written in a different way. They’re not cross-referencing each other. There are a number of challenges associated with that.
“If this works, and we’ve invested an awful lot by bringing our colleagues here to be able to make sure that you are able to log on and work with this, it will be a sea change in the way that we do assessments because it will allow for this more collaborative and co-creation type of model to happen organically.”
- Client
- United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
- Industry
- Nonprofit
- Services
- Data and AI
- Country
- Norway
The importance of GEO-7
UNEP initiates and publishes a lot of climate science research, but its Global Environment Outlook is the most wide-reaching and authoritative. GEO-6, the last published report, came out in 2019; GEO-7 has a long and complex timeline that takes it to publication in 2026.
The aim of GEO-7 is in UNEP’s own words “to provide an integrated and holistic environmental assessment of pathways to address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution”.
Unpacking that sentence a little, it is clear that GEO-7 wants to present not only the latest thinking on a range of environmental challenges, but also to make the science actionable in terms of policy for the United Nations as a body, and for individual member states as they strive to avert catastrophe.
The research and policymaking must go hand-in-hand and emerge from an “integrated and holistic” discipline of collaboration. This is where SoftwareOne comes in.
The SoftwareOne platform
The individual research and methodology papers for GEO-7 are written by teams of authors who work together closely. Scientists and policymakers are accustomed to doing this, usually from within the confines of Google Docs which is the most popular collaboration tool at universities.
In other words, consistency is not normally an issue within the silo of an individual paper.
Where UNEP encountered most problems in the past was with the internal coherence of its GEO publication as a whole. The papers didn’t “talk” to each other because the platform for such a dialogue was missing.
This is operationally undesirable, and harmful in terms of the scientific outcome because nature does not operate in siloes. Pollution, biodiversity, food waste, and policy direction affect each other in complex but critical ways.
This is how Boileau addressed the scientists and researchers after SoftwareOne had finished the demo of its portal. “There needs to be a lot of interconnectivity or interaction across these chapters,” he said, “because this is a holistic problem and we’re proposing holistic solutions that have environmental, social, and economic benefits in these solutions pathways.
“We're trying to create a tool that will allow that to happen so that you can see what the other chapters are doing at any given point in time, read the other chapters, understand whether they’re duplicating what you’re doing, understand if they missed a gap in the logic or the rationale, communicate with them if you need to.”
The backbone of the SoftwareOne solution is Microsoft 365 with an intricate hierarchy of user rights. The UNEP administrators assign the appropriate editing or read-only rights to Lead Authors, Authors, Review Editors, and authorial assistants called Fellows. Authors can go beyond the ‘walled gardens’ of their own work to read what is happening in other chapters of GEO-7.
Another important advance implemented on the SoftwareOne portal is that for the first time, the Secretariat is able to track the progress of its flagship report. UNEP administrators are not permissioned to read the content as it is being drafted but they can check if the teams are meeting deadlines and diversity targets.
The first plans for GEO-7 were beginning to be negotiated in 2019 when the ink on GEO-6 was barely dry. The inaugural session in Bangkok last year set off a demanding cascade of meetings, submission deadlines, peer review processes and so on which are deftly orchestrated in the solution. You always know what deadline you are facing, the documents you need, and which virtual or in-person meeting is coming up.
Separate licenses and a discrete development effort were implemented for the data handling, but this is also horizontally integrated with the SoftwareOne platform.
The log-in process as demoed to the Assembly will have looked familiar to most GEO-7 delegates, yet UNEP didn’t want to take any chances and kept the SoftwareOne team in Thailand for a week to optimize adoption.
While it is true to say that the platform does not break any new technological ground, it bears repeating that before SoftwareOne delivered it, UNEP and its technology partners had made several unsuccessful attempts to develop a collaboration tool that worked.
Another feather in SoftwareOne’s cap is that the team was able to build the solution in under three months to be ready for Bangkok after the latest attempt to build a satisfactory solution had been abandoned.
You will recall the words from Boileau to the eminent researchers and policy strategists at the Bangkok meeting. “If this works,” said the head of GEO-7, “it will be a sea change in the way we do assessments.”
So is the collaboration platform working?
The United Nations of SoftwareOne
The assessment process kicks off in earnest in the first half of 2024, with Expert Peer reviews, the authors’ response to them, and a further “quality of response assessment” planned for May. UNEP and its lead technology partners GRID-Arendal and the Norwegian consultancy EGDE who contracted SoftwareOne, are already highly positive about what the platform has achieved in terms of imposing a coherence of tone and intention on GEO-7.
While it is too early in the process to document all the benefits of what SoftwareOne presented in March 2023, UNEP has already declared its intention to deploy the platform for the other reports it authors and sponsors. Now, one year later, a new project has been started in parallel, based on the same setup as the GEO-7 report. This shows that SoftwareOne's efforts have attracted attention from various UN departments, who clearly see the value the platform can bring to their operations and can lay the foundation for how future reports will be conducted.
SoftwareOne is not the lead contractor for this project; it was EGDE that sought the support of SoftwareOne expertise. The portal does not push the envelope in terms of innovation, as we said, and neither was it a financial game changer for SoftwareOne.
But change, positive change, is what makes this a key initiative. UNEP is under no illusion: the successful outcome of GEO-7 depends in large part on the adoption of the platform.
In Crayon’s (now SoftwareOne) 2022 Annual Report, the section on the environment is headlined: One Planet. Saving that planet requires a united stance, a unified approach across a single platform, made possible by what Crayon has delivered to UNEP – and the world.
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