The UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) have become the most important document of our times. Every country in the world has signed up them, and more than 10 million people were involved in their formulation. These 17 goals have become a collective global work plan which aims to eliminate poverty, combat inequality and halt climate change by 2030.
Bouvet is the largest Norwegian-owned IT company, and is growing organically and in a controlled manner with regard to offices, employees, clients, turnover and profits. We are both adaptable and influential. Our vision is: we lead the way and build tomorrow’s society. That calls for both the willingness to create changes and the vigour to implement them.
A sustainability perspective is becoming a self-evident part of our business and our everyday life, as commonplace as charging a mobile and logging onto the web. Our employees drive us forward with the necessary impatience and demand that we have our own house in order. Our clients expect sustainability to be incorporated in every contract. And our suppliers know that they must deliver in a sustainable way if they want to collaborate with us.
How many of the 17 UN SDGs are relevant for us?
The answer is simple – all of them. Because these goals collectively form a whole. We cannot get rid of poverty unless inequalities are evened out and climate change slowed down. In the same way, decent work and economic growth for all are only possible when people are well educated, healthy and have equal opportunities. Innovation and infrastructure, which are also part of the SDGs, form the core of our DNA.
Our culture – the most valuable thing we possess – builds in part on closeness, to our employees, our clients and the local communities we are part of. Perhaps our most important contribution to a sustainable future is that we are hands-on with all of these. We have built our business on the power of sharing. And we embrace an inclusive and diverse culture. Diversity for us is about more than gender, ethnicity or beliefs – it also particularly includes experience and diversity in expertise. Valuing and developing the people who have been with us for a long time is therefore just as important as recruiting new personnel. Long-serving staff are our culture-bearers, and thereby extremely valuable in every way.
Four important choices
“Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something” says a Chinese proverb. We can do a lot, thanks to our size, our expertise and our clients. Our client list includes almost all the large – and many of the small – enterprises in Norway is such fields as energy, transport, health care, education, infrastructure and critical societal safety.
We work locally in all these fields, whether in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim or Stavanger, Kristiansand, Sandvika, Stockholm and Örebro. If anyone can make a difference, it must really be us.
There are certain things we will stand together on and promote, regardless of who we work for and where we are:
We believe in making an all-out effort, but believe even more strongly in working steadily and in what happens in everyday life. We know that we must take responsibility for everything we do ourselves – wholeheartedly and 100 per cent – in order to be a good adviser to others. We will involve and include our clients. And we will listen to and learn from them.
We do then what we have promised to ourselves and to each other – we then lead the way and build tomorrow’s society.
We hope you will join with us, so that we can get better together.