Impact Assessment

SusAF - Sustainability Awareness Framework

SusAF helps you in assessing the sustainability effects of a product, by guiding you through steps and in that way helping you to see both the positive and negative effects that it has. You will find as much as possible of the effects and grade them based on their impact and effect. Finally, you will be able to see the big image, and how those effects are interconnected and how they affect the planet, society and each one of us. You will be able to improve your product, as the final goal is to create sustainable and responsible products. What SusAF focuses on is:

Determining the sustainability impacts and effects of IT products and services across five dimensions: social, individual, environmental, economic, and technical. This involved the examination of these impacts through three orders of effect: direct, indirect, and systemic.

Promoting discussions about the expected effects of IT products and services.

Key Elements in Susaf

The 5 dimensions of Sustainability :

The Environmental dimension is about conserving natural resources and protect global ecosystems to support health and wellbeing, now and in the future

The Economic dimension is concerned with finance, profit, investment

The Social dimension covers relationships between individuals and groups.

The Individual dimension focus on o the maintenance of individual human capital

The Technical dimension refers to maintenance and evolution, resilience of IT products, services or software systems.

Susaf Process

Warm-Up

The idea behind this phase is to warm-up. You should start thinking about the product and scratching the surface of its sustainability. Get familiar with the product, and what your team thinks about it. First of all, just try to describe the product that you will be analyzing.

What is it used for? What is its main feature, or a couple of them? Who uses this product? Why do they use it? How does the product help in any way? Do you see something obviously good or obviously bad about it?

Discuss within the team, brainstorm and write down the ideas. The following two questions should be answered in the next 20-30 minutes.

Describe the product with its main features and main contributions.

Overall, high level explanation

The first thing that you think of when you think of the product

What are the out-of-the-box known sustainability effects?

Positive and negative effects that you can perceive in the product just by thinking of it, and having a short discussion

For example, Facebook’s obvious sustainability effects are that it allows you to connect with people, to chat with friends and family, to share pictures

This is what you know just by thinking of Facebook

No need to overthink at this point, or to try to find causes of it

Just everything that pops into your mind

Capture

In this phase you should collect and categorize the potential effects of the IT product regarding sustainability.

You should start looking through one of the sustainability dimensions and read the questions related to every sub-category of that dimension.

Then, write down the first effects that come to mind in your notes sheets, it shouldn't take you more than one minute. To do that, consider the effects of the product, its working process, and its business model.

Write the Positive effects on blue cards and the negative effects on orange ones to separate them, then present all your ideas and discuss them within your team. And remember:

Quality over quantity

Do not judge

Do not worry if you are not able to comment on all ideas

After gathering all your effects, decide which ideas are worth capturing and focussing on. The chosen ideas can then be classified in the SUSAF diagram based on their likelihood and the level of their impact

Analysis

Before going into this phase, you should know about First, Second and Third order effects (which are described in the SUSAF book). But in simple words first order effects are immediate or direct consequences of an action, second order effects are Indirect consequences that follow the first order effects, and finally third order effects are the long-term changes that can significantly alter the environment in which the initial action took place.

In this phase, you should try to “relate” the short and long term effects of each dimension (that we have already discovered in the previous phases) to get the chain of effects.

Think from this perspective, that you want to know the broader implications of your IT product/service. Having a chain of effects can help you prevent unintended outcomes, strategic planning and robust decision making.

First mention the effects (from likelihood and impact matrix) in specific dimensions and order a susad diagram, and then try to see what each effect leads to. And if one effect leads to another we connect them using an arrow.

Synthesis