Bant Breen:
InsideChains works with organizations to get beyond the hype through solution development and product management to drive new business models powered by data and network layers. What was the eureka moment that led you to come up with this plan and strategy to put this book together?
Cristina Dolan:
I’ve always been in the sort of data and connectivity space throughout my career. A publisher reached out was saying, “Wow, this is a hot topic,” and we have a lot of students that are studying this. They need to understand what and why. What is this ESG? Why do we care about it? We’ve heard a lot about the environment, the E, but I don’t think people understand the S and the G, the social impact. For example, if a company goes out of business, it’s not just the employees, it’s the customers, it’s the community. This kind of intangible metric for understanding the impact of companies that there are lots and lots of data companies taking these little, tiny data points. There are a lot of financial firms looking at this from a variety of different lenses. I was sort of curious about how to understand this space to be able to make an impact, because if you don’t understand it, how are you going to manage and make a change? Or make sure that you are launching a sustainable company or you’re within a sustainable company? It was about tying all this together. And, of course, I’ve been in the cyberspace for at least four years launching several companies and working with a variety of companies in the cyber risk space in Fido, which is the access side with a wonderful company from Europe and they’re involved with LoT, and ability to have an identity associated with all these things that we have on connected networks. Cyber is a big threat. The data, the connectivity, it all comes together with ESG.
Bant Breen:
There are some big challenges. What are the things that you see that are hurdles for folks moving forward in this space?
Cristina Dolan:
Just to your point, the FCA is now requiring that any financial firms in the UK must provide a report at the end of this year. So Demin, this idea of demonstrating what you’re doing as an organization to embed that within the fabric of your whole organization, both at the CEO board-level C-level managers and employees is now becoming even more important. I think that the bigger issue is that people don’t understand what that means. Putting together this sort of a plan to execute sustainability plans is something that companies are still trying to work out a bit.
Bant Breen:
When you think about the work that you’re doing, what gives you the most joy from your work?
Cristina Dolan:
It’s interesting because this is a particular space that is somewhat complex and hard to understand and cannot just help organizations put together a plan and solve problems, but also, in terms of removing the ambiguity that exists. After all, there is a lot of ambiguity. That makes it hard to create a sustainability plan or a cyber risk assessment or even understand the use of technology within their organizations. Something as simple as having an agreement with a larger organization where you have all these terms and conditions. Now there are components, it goes beyond just having a penetration test for cybersecurity, you must adhere to a certain level of security within the supply chain. You must be able to adhere to and report on sustainability because that gets rolled up and then reported in annual reports and other yearly reports. I love the complexity and being an engineer sort of digging in and being able to help to put together plans. In this space, it’s so ambiguous, I love the opportunity to be able to create that clarity and create these plans and be able to use sort of all these different things I’ve been involved with as a mechanism to create solutions for organizations and people.
Bant Breen:
Cristina, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged Youtube channel, go to: