16. Materiality assessment

Abstract

Through materiality assessment practices, organizations determine which topics are relevant, so the necessary resources can be allocated to later assess the organizational performance, disclose the results, and manage the corresponding impacts. This chapter reviews the scientific and industrial state of the art on materiality assessment. We present a reference method and discuss the supporting information and communication technology (ICT). Materiality assessment begins with the identification of topics, for which stakeholder engagement is essential. Then a prioritization process takes place, in order to determine the relative importance of each topic to internal and external stakeholders. The results are often presented as a two-dimensional materiality matrix and included in sustainability reports. Typical data-collection methods that are used within materiality assessment are surveys, interviews and focus groups. Additionally, new software tools offer text analytics features to automatically process textual resources such as public and internal organizational documentation, sustainability reports from peer organizations, news sites and social media. We review several tools in the market and focus on openMAsses, an open-source tool with such capabilities.