Meet Fiona: From Tech Consultant to Sustainability Advocate

Ten years in customer-facing technology advisory roles at Deloitte and Salesforce had given me a career most people would be happy with. I had the client portfolio, the frameworks, the slide decks. What I didn't have was a sense of purpose. So I signed up for the CISL online Business Sustainability Management course, thinking it might round things out, maybe add a useful lens to my work. It sent me into a small but real crisis. I finished the course fired up and then quickly hit a wall: I am not a scientist, not a politician, not a business leader with a corner office and a transformation budget. I don't have the skills or the influence to save the world.

The way out of that crisis wasn't a grand revelation but a practical decision. I had spent years helping organisations adopt new technologies, navigate change, understand their customers. Why not build on that? I started looking at where technology and sustainability intersect, and the connections came fast. Data centres and energy use, hardware supply chains and e-waste, AI models and their carbon footprints. Every area I knew from my consulting days had a sustainability dimension I had been walking past without noticing. Since AI exploded the overlap between these two worlds only deepened.

When I started in IT Sustainability there weren’t any traditional jobs on the market, so I created my own and founded SparkIT with a vision to support CIOs in understanding their role in the company sustainability strategy.

I won't pretend the motivation is always clean or steady, some weeks it feels genuinely helpless. Global leaders are walking back sustainability commitments. Regulations get delayed, targets get quietly dropped, and the planet sends weekly reminders, through floods and heatwaves and record-breaking temperatures, that it is not waiting for us to get our act together.

Here is what keeps me going: people still care. I see it in the people who reach out after a talk, the clients who decide to change a procurement process, the friends who ask genuine questions because they want to do better. The political winds shift, but the underlying concern has not gone away. It is just harder to hear above the noise.

The evidence is clearer than it has ever been and we know what needs to be done, it is just a case of taking action. The technologies we need already exist and are getting cheaper to implement. We are not waiting for a breakthrough; we are waiting for the will to use what we have.

I am optimistic. I believe we will see a return of global focus on creating a liveable planet. The pressure is building from below, from citizens, from employees, from communities on the frontlines of climate change, and eventually there will be no choice but to act. Momentum builds quietly, then moves suddenly.

It is easy to stand outside a large corporation and point fingers, but big companies are not monoliths. They are systems made of people, processes, leadership structures, market pressures, quarterly expectations, and a thousand competing priorities. Blaming them as if they were a single malicious actor is unproductive. It is important to meet the customer where they are and build the business case they can actually take to a board.

I now combine my technology background with sustainability in practical, hands-on ways. That means IT sustainability strategy, including measuring emissions with Lifecycle Assessments (LCA) and running improvement programmes across procurement, hosting, and end-user devices. I also run tailored workshops, not just for leadership but for managers and employees too, to bring everyone on the journey.

The other opportunity inside a company is not just making IT greener but using digital for sustainability. Early on in my time at SparkIT, I spent eight months embedded in a sustainability team, implementing Watershed to support their annual reporting. Sitting alongside that team I saw their priorities up close and felt their challenges. I understood the constant tension between ambition and capacity, between what they wanted to do and what they had the time and data to actually deliver. The potential for technology and data to accelerate their strategy was there, but the connection to the technology team was missing. The sustainability team had vision and conviction, what they often lacked was the technical fluency, the data infrastructure, and the implementation muscle to move faster.

Since then, I have worked with sustainability teams to help them holistically understand what technology can do for them, mapping where tech can remove friction, create insight, and unlock speed. Increasingly, that work has a special focus on AI: cutting through the noise to understand the real impacts and potential of AI in the context of the company.