In an effort to try to provide better transparency into the various terms describing ‘new’ kinds of corporate reporting, I’ll explain the differences between integrated, connected and holistic reporting. This is a rather long post so I suggest a shot of Red Bull, Maté, snuff or some other stimulant before you start.

Let’s use a simple example – an airline route report, which might look something like this:

As you can see, this report includes both financial and non-financial data and represents what some people call an ‘integrated’ report. The rows are routes and the columns summarize data that would be sourced from profit and loss accounts and statistical accounts. There’s nothing new about this. Clients were asking me to produce this kind of report directly from their accounting system 20 years ago (although they weren’t asking for carbon emissions data as no-one cared much about it then) and it’s easy enough for a well-designed accounting system to produce it (but quite hard for a badly designed one). Maybe that’s why all this stuff seems so hard to a lot of people, they were using the wrong software, but I digress.

This is quite a handy snapshot report for an airline route manager, but on its own it’s not enough because it’s not connected. A connected report leverages online publication and link-based drilldown to deliver a richer information context, for example:

A connected report  not only enriches the information but also brings more clarity to it, thereby increasing the overall transparency of the report. By connecting the report to other reports and scorecards through drilldown/through/over this report acts as the ‘gateway’ to a range of information ‘pathways’.

But it’s still not a holistic report because the aim of a holistic report is to deliver ‘intentional transparency’ by situating the part (route report) within the whole (organizational community). The holistic version goes yet another step further:

The fully holistic report connects the data to other, textual reports or policies or twitter streams or feedback survey results…whatever improves the transparency of the data. This additional layer of content and context represents what in screenwriting terms is called the ‘backstory’ of the route – the numbers on their own are useful, the connections are useful but the picture is incomplete without the backstory. Why did we do what we did? How did we behave to generate these numbers? And don’t forget the ‘forwardstory’ i.e. what are we going to do to improve?

A holistic report presents a holistic view of the data. A holistic view can’t be delivered without integrating financial and non-financial data and connecting disparate quantitative and qualitative data together and presenting that data in a holistic way so that all kinds of information becomes easier to find and easier to understand so the whole effect is intentionally transparent.

And this holistic report only represents level 1 holisticity. A truly holistic report would be situated within a peer group set of reports either within a country or across countries. Level 2 holistic reports recognize another level of ‘whole’  and the kind of reporting that is going to be vital in the context of our global economy.

Tags: holistic

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 2:17 am and is filed under Communication, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.