Integrated Reporting

At its best, integrated thinking empowers companies to cut through functional silos and use reporting as a unified mean to drive short term performance and long-term sustainability of their businesses.

As early members of the Integrated Reporting Council’s working groups, we were able to follow firsthand the challenges faced by early adopters and how to overcome them:

• Companies tend to treat most data points with the same importance instead of focusing on activities that can have biggest impact on value creation. When all functions share a common understanding about what drives value, the organization is able to speak the same language and move easier in the same direction.
• Most reporting doesn’t incorporate the context in which a company is operating in. When performance deteriorates, it’s usually attributed to external factors such as “worsening economic climate in the region”, while positive market developments are often linked to business unit’s “strong performance”. A more nuanced inclusion within the reporting cycle of the environment’s dynamics sets the stage for higher quality decisions.
• Strategic choices and priorities are rarely properly reflected in the planning and reporting cycles and therefore end-up being poorly managed. This often leads to lost opportunities, suboptimal projects execution or significant waste of resources.
• Complicated and poorly integrated IT landscapes are often not aligned with the organization and fail on meeting the information needs. This leads to a very slow delivery of information and lack of actionable insights. Seamless systems integration enables companies shift towards a forward-looking stance and react faster to internal or external rapidly changing developments.