August 11th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Documents are so flexible aren’t they? You can mix text and numbers, tables and charts – all within the same page context. You can even spend lots of time making a page look aesthetically pleasing and make the information enticing. To an individual human reader, a single well-designed page can communicate a lot of information very effectively.
But what if you want to communicate data to many different information consumers with different interests in the data? What if your focus is not a single human ‘page reader’ but the rapidly expanding universe of online web services that ‘consume’ data programmatically to make it easier for any human information consumer to crowdsource and crowdshare and compare and contrast the data?
That’s when document-centric information design falls down in comparison to data-centric design. To illustrate why, I’ll examine the Global Reporting Initiative’s NGO Sector Supplement Economic Indicator NG08 as an example. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: GRI
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability, XBRL | View Comments
August 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As I gradually become more aware of all the various sets of sustainability reporting indicators out there, I wonder if there isn’t a little confusion as to what an ‘indicator’ or ‘metric’ actually is in a sustainability context. Are we in fact talking about indicators when we mean evidence? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Wal-Mart
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability, Transparency | View Comments
August 2nd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
A new consultation paper from the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) could end up having a significant impact on both the adoption of XBRL across Europe and the expansion of the global XBRL standards-based financial information ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: EU
Posted in Analytics, Communication, XBRL | View Comments
July 22nd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Our data maven Ted Stavropoulos alerted me to Microsoft’s new ‘codename Dallas‘ initiative. And no, it’s not an attempt to bring back JR, Sue Ellen and all the other cheeseballs from Southfork ranch. It’s something even better than that – an appstore for data. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
We’re glad to see that Europe is adopting a Retail Environment Sustainability Code and especially that one of the six ‘commitments’ is reporting…
Signatories agree to report on the progress as regards this code through their existing procedures, for instance through their annual CSR or other reports.
It all sounds great but without some kind of agreed definition of what is being reported I can’t see how that really helps. So you know where this is going…
What the RESC needs is a XBRL taxonomy or at the least they need to cherry pick some stuff out of the GRI indicator set for the retail sector and agree on that. Then at least we have data agreement and some level of data comparability so we can make an informed judgement about who’s really making progress on the other 5 commitments.
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability | View Comments
July 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
You’ll have to wait until Sunday to see if Spain can win the ‘real’ World Cup but in the meantime, they have definitely won the world cup in sustainability scorecards. Thanks to my pal Alejandro at the Spanish AECA, I have now been alerted to the availability of Spain’s online sustainability scorecards (driven by XBRL) that you can find here. They are definitely worth a look… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Sustainability, Taxonomies, XBRL | View Comments
July 6th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As a follow up to my previous 4 Lines Is All It Takes post, I’d like to elaborate on what the those 4 sustainability reporting lines would actually report. A Sustainability 10-Q (simplified) if you like. Just as a reminder, the 4 lines are:
INCOME STATEMENT
Sustainability Revenue
Sustainability Costs
BALANCE SHEET
Sustainability Assets
Sustainability Liabilities
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Control, Sustainability | View Comments
July 1st, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Those of us who have been around the business intelligence (BI) space for a while will be familiar with the old mantra – ‘one version of the truth’. What this primarily refers to is the problem of data consistency when storing data in the mess of separate spreadsheet files used for managing analysis and reporting in most businesses. One version of the truth means using a database for storing the BI data (in so-called ‘fact’ tables) and then sitting the spreadsheets (or spreadsheet-like report views) on top of this single server-based data repository for data presentation and manipulation at the desktop. Pretty simple concept. So what’s this got to do with XBRL taxonomies? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: spreadsheet
Posted in Analytics, Taxonomies, XBRL | View Comments
June 17th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Reading an old Business Finance article I wrote over a decade ago called Portal to the Future got me thinking that maybe the future of ‘integrated’ or ‘connected’ reporting is not about reports at all but about ‘mashboards’. I wish I’d coined that term but I didn’t. Mashboards are the portals of today, dashboards that mashup data from inside and outside the corporate firewall to help make the connection between financial performance, corporate behaviour and stakeholder feedback. Mashboards are visual, web-based and indicator-driven portals that combine financial data with Google maps and Flickr photos and Twitter tweets – they mashup the financial, social and environmental information to present a more holistic view of what a business is doing.
So perhaps all this talk of sustainability ‘reporting’ is misplaced, outdated and irrelevant if the portal to the future is really the mashboard.
Tags: mashboard
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June 7th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research recently published an interesting paper called Visualizing Basic Accounting Flows:Does XBRL+Model+Animation=Understanding by four authors from the Oregon State University. They propose an online Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV) that consumes XBRL data from S.E.C. filings to present a new kind of visualization of a corporate filer’s financial position.
University of Oregon - Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV)
While the visualization that the AFV produces is deliberately basic, it doesn’t much matter because as the authors point out “…it makes sense as we explore the analysis utility of XBRL as opposed to its impact on reporting efficiency.” They have focused on the visualization of flows and of change (between filings) so their AFV can be animated to allow both backward and forward animation in the data set. Which all highlights another practical use for XBRL data: Teaching accounting relationships and potentially, financial scenario forensics.
Posted in Analytics, XBRL | View Comments
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