Undervaluing Regulatory Intelligence: Why Dakota Software Stopped Participating in the Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant

If you ask EHS leaders what’s driving their technology investment right now, the answer is consistent: regulations.

In a 2026 global survey by Verdantix, the independent analyst firm behind the industry’s leading EHS Software Green Quadrant benchmark, emerging regulations, ESG frameworks, and compliance standards top the list of factors respondents named as shaping EHS technology decisions over the next two years, ahead of executive priorities, macroeconomic conditions, even climate risk. 

So here’s the question we’ve been asking for a while: if regulatory pressure is what buyers say matters most, why doesn’t the industry’s leading EHS software benchmark measure it?

Where We Started: Our History with the Verdantix Green Quadrant

For more than 35 years, Dakota Software’s philosophy has been simple: regulatory compliance is the foundation that everything else an EHS program is built on. Not a checkbox, not a cost center. The foundation.

We built our ProActivity Suite around a continuously updated, human-curated library of regulatory content because we believed that getting the underlying regulatory picture right was the hardest and most consequential problem in the EHS software market, and the one most vendors were least equipped to solve.

In 2017, we put that philosophy to the test by participating in Verdantix’s Green Quadrant report for the first time. Verdantix identified our in-house regulatory content and site-specific compliance profiles as a genuine differentiator, calling it a “bulletproof” approach to managing EHS compliance. Our EHS Auditing capability scored highest in its category.

Two years later, the 2019 Verdantix Green Quadrant report recognized Dakota again, this time as an EHS Innovator, and specifically called out that, unlike most competitors, Dakota develops its US-focused regulatory content in-house. The report recommended Dakota to North American organizations for whom compliance management was a top priority.

We were proud of both. We still are.

Giving Credit Where It’s Due: The Green Quadrant Methodology

Before we get to the part where we disagree, it’s worth saying clearly: Verdantix’s methodology is thorough. The questionnaire alone runs into the hundreds of points and takes days to complete. Each solution provider also completes a scenario-based, live product demonstration, and Verdantix independently verifies provider claims through customer interviews. On top of that, a transparent weighting framework shows exactly how much each capability contributes to the final score.

That’s more rigor than most analyst benchmarks bring to the table, and it’s part of why the Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant carries real weight with buyers. This isn’t a story about bad research. It’s a story about what even good research chooses to measure, and what it doesn’t.

Where the Gap Opened Up in EHS Management Software

Go back and look at the 2019 report’s own conclusions, and you can already see where things were headed: Verdantix’s own analysis at the time pointed to safety and operational risk functionality as the areas increasingly driving buyer priority and software adoption. That’s a reasonable finding on its own. But it also marked the start of a drift, one that’s now fully visible in the current methodology.

The 2026 Green Quadrant report publishes exactly how each functional capability is weighted:

The slant toward safety management functions is clear, and this is where the drift begins. Safety categories are largely about running a consistent process. Does the software help a team execute the same workflow, the same way, every time? Regulatory complexity is a smaller factor in workplace safety.

Environmental categories are different. Air emissions calculations, chemical thresholds, and hazardous waste management are governed by dense, complex federal and state requirements that vary by jurisdiction and by industry.

Within each of those small Environmental categories, regulatory currency, whether the underlying data actually reflects what’s changed and when, is reduced to a single sub-question buried alongside three or four unrelated ones about calculation engines, permit tracking, and reporting formats.

Regulatory intelligence is never assessed as a capability in its own right, anywhere in the framework. Not under Environmental. Not under the catch-all “EHS compliance and risk management” category, which asks about risk registers and emergency response but never about how current, complete, or defensible a vendor’s regulatory content actually is.

That’s a meaningful thing to miss, and it’s not a content question, it’s a software question. Nobody’s arguing an EHS software benchmark should score whose regulatory library reads better. What’s missing is an assessment of the functionality that turns that content into something usable: does the platform map obligations to specific facilities, detect and surface changes automatically, measure regulatory readiness and risk, and put all of it in front of the user directly, not scattered across spreadsheets or third-party tools.

That’s engineering, not content curation, and it belongs squarely inside a software benchmark’s scope.

That distinction matters because most platforms don’t build that functionality at all. Many either ask customers to maintain their own regulatory content, or import a static feed from a third-party provider with no software layer doing the applicability mapping or change detection. Either way, that work falls back on the customer, exactly the kind of manual, error-prone process a functionality benchmark should be built to catch.

That’s the gap. Not a lack of rigor, but a structural blind spot in how regulatory guidance, change tracking, readiness, and risk are measured.

Why We Stepped Back: Key Takeaways

After our 2019 recognition, we made a decision: we weren’t going to keep participating in the Verdantix Green Quadrant because its framework measured certain functions and features but not the capabilities that we believe matter most. This wasn’t a reaction to any single report or conclusion. It was a conscious decision, made from a position we’d already proven out twice, and continuing to compete inside a methodology that structurally underweighted regulatory intelligence didn’t serve us or the buyers reading the report.

We’ve shared this feedback with Verdantix directly over the years. We respect their work enough to have that conversation and make a case for reconsidering how these capabilities are categorized and scored. This post is simply the first time we’re sharing our thoughts publicly.

“From day one, our vision has been simple: give EHS leaders high quality regulatory content they can trust and act on. Obligations are complex and keep evolving. That’s why we built the platform to scale, from applicability mapping to audit, so our customers, who range from mid-market teams to the largest, most complex multi-site enterprises, can measure regulatory readiness and mitigate risk, no matter how complicated the regulatory landscape gets.” 

— Reg Shiverick, President, Dakota Software

What a Real EHS Regulatory Intelligence Category Would Measure

If Verdantix, or anyone, covered this category in their analysis, here is what it should include:

• Regulatory Coverage Depth and Visibility: Does the platform’s regulatory content go as deep as a topic actually requires, or is coverage shallow and uniform regardless of complexity? Can staff see, at a glance, which topics are applicable, non-applicable, or still undetermined for their specific facility, or do they have to dig for the answers?

• Guided Applicability Determination: When a facility needs to determine whether a requirement actually applies to it, does the platform guide that determination with real regulatory logic and document the reasoning behind it, or does it leave staff to work it out on their own?

• Change Detection and Decision Support: When a regulation changes, does the platform surface exactly what changed, with regulatory guidance and clear explanation of past applicability determination, or does it just flag that something updated?

• Audit-Defensibility for Management Systems: Can the platform demonstrate a defined, documented process for identifying regulatory obligations and tracking changes to them, the kind of evidence an ISO 14001 or ISO 45001 certification audit actually requires, or does it only offer a general claim of staying current?

• Regulatory Readiness and Operational Impacts: When regulations change or new ones are proposed, does the platform provide the analysis leadership needs to understand the true scope and impact, exactly which facilities are affected and which are keeping pace?

• Penalty and Financial Risk Exposure: Can the platform provide insight into penalty risk and financial data tied to a specific compliance gap, or does it stop at flagging the gap?

These are the questions EHS leaders should be asking every solution provider that claims their solutions can help them manage regulatory risk, whether or not an analyst report asks them first.

Where We Stand Today: Not Named a Leader, and Why That’s the Point

Regulatory obligations haven’t gotten simpler since 2019. If anything, the number of “action-forcing requirements” EHS teams have to track has only grown. Compliance and risk management continues to be a driver for EHS software purchases now, as it was then. What’s changed is how the analyst community scores software capabilities against that reality, and we don’t think it’s kept pace. Our solutions and services support these challenges head on, with additional emphasis on a streamlined user experience and advanced analytics to measure progress toward corporate EHS and sustainability goals.

We’re happy that Verdantix’s most recent Buyer’s Guide to Specialized Mid-Market EHS Software recognizes Dakota as an “EHS regulatory risk platform” built for high-risk operations, well-suited to organizations seeking regulatory certainty in their compliance planning. Frankly, we think that report’s open-ended format leaves room for real innovation to stand out, something a feature-by-feature ranking like the Green Quadrant isn’t built to recognize.

We’ll keep building the EHS software solutions we’ve always built, with regulatory intelligence creating value at the core, not bolted on, so EHS leaders can navigate their obligations efficiently instead of just checking boxes. If that’s the problem you’re trying to solve, we’d love to help you explore it. Contact us to get started.