Holistic Reporting

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 like a work of art. 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 programatically 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 »

Supply chain auditing for sustainability is catching on quickly amongst many of the world’s largest supply chain orchestrators (e.g. Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencers etc). And for good reason. So it was only a matter of time before someone got to grips with defining a comprehensive set of reporting indicators for standardizing this activity. That somebody is the Eco Index. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been spending some time recently doing a little analysis of online GRI reporting, which has involved looking at their indicator sets and how these are reported by organizations. This led me to BP and MM12 and the need to re-emphasize that for reporting to work you have to report… Read the rest of this entry »