Through IBCS you take internal and external reporting to a new level
The Management Information Design Solutions:
Optimal report quality through Management Information Design
Reporting is the basis of successful entrepreneurial action: On the one hand, reporting serves management as a basis for effective and goal-oriented planning, controlling and decision-making. On the other hand, external investors and lenders examine the company's development on the basis of key figures in order to be able to make precise investment decisions. At the same time, there is also a reporting obligation towards state institutions (e.g. tax or financial market supervisory authorities).
In practice, however, the opposite is still often the case: reports and analyses often do not use a uniform notation. This manifests itself, for example, in unclear tables, distorted representations, inappropriate diagrams, confusing graphic presentations, excessive report volumes or even the seemingly arbitrary use of colours. In such cases, all the recipients of the report mentioned at the beginning run the risk of making suboptimal or worse decisions on the basis of missing, incomplete and/or misleading information.
The quality of the reporting is of fundamental importance in each case: the reports must be as informative as possible in order to be recorded and interpreted by the recipients as quickly, precisely and unambiguously as possible. The basic prerequisite for this is an adequate presentation of the contents - ideally by means of standardised notation concepts for visualisation.
"In practice, management information designs - such as IBCS - are often not applied: reports and analyses often do not use a uniform notation. This manifests itself, for example, in unclear tables, distorted representations, inappropriate diagrams, confusing graphic presentations, too large report volumes or even in the seemingly arbitrary use of colours. In such cases, all the recipients of the report mentioned at the beginning run the risk of making suboptimal or worse decisions on the basis of missing, incomplete and/or misleading information.
Because only information that is as well prepared and visualised as possible in reporting (both internally and externally) can be used as efficiently and advantageously as possible. Thus, it is important to ensure the uniform understanding and the identical interpretation of contents comprehensively and sustainably: clearly, quickly and precisely mapped data are increasingly becoming a success-relevant or literally decisive factor."
What technologies do we use for reporting?
FAQs Management Information Design
Appropriate information design ensures that decision-relevant information is made available to the respective report recipients in a precise, transparent, comparable and addressee-appropriate manner. The basis for this are defined standards for the visual preparation of information - in the form of uniform notation concepts.
In other fields, such nomenclatures have already been used successfully for a very long time. A particularly striking example is the field of music: thanks to the internationally valid notation, musicians with different mother tongues can easily communicate and cooperate with each other on stage. Maps, construction plans or electronic circuit diagrams are also uniformly and unmistakably legible worldwide.
Which in turn clearly confirms: Visual recognition plays a central role in the efficient recording, analysis, understanding and interpretation of complex amounts of information (i.e. data) - provided that certain laws are observed. In business administration, the principles of information design are applied in this regard. Their practical application offers companies the opportunity to successfully take their internal and external reporting to a new level.
The IBCS® (International Business Communication Standards®) based on the SUCCESS reference framework by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rolf Hichert aim at maximum transparency in reporting, business communication and presentation design. These notation standards form the basis for optimal, practice-oriented information design according to the following principles:
S AY Convey message
U NIFY Apply semantic notation
C ONDENSE Increase information density
C HECK Ensure visual integrity
E XPRESS Select suitable visualization
S IMPLIFY Avoid superfluous
S TRUCTURE Structure content
- Report messages are directly visible
- Contents are structured in a uniform, non-overlapping and exhaustive manner
- Decoration is eliminated, instead clear information is present
- Value and measurement variables are defined
- Contents are condensed
- Reporting errors are eliminated as part of the project
Dashboards present all important and success-relevant information graphically or in tabular form on one screen - condensed, highly aggregated, clear and transparent. In this way, all relevant key figures can be recorded and monitored at a glance. Drill-downs and options for data filtering are often available to enable the most effective and goal-oriented work possible.
Optimal information design is also crucial for dashboards, as the collection of information is oriented towards the principles of visual human perception. Thus, the design should be as comprehensible and descriptive as possible - ideally based on the quasi-standard IBCS® and accompanied by simple, intuitive operation by the user.
Compared to conventional reporting solutions, dashboard information is not presented in a print-optimised way, but specifically for on-screen capture. The arrangement of the related information details therefore fits on one or a few screen pages. In this way, only what is really relevant is compressed into a format that is quick and easy to understand.
KNOWLEDGE
Useful information
In this webinar we present the s-peers SAC Cash Panel. This solution allows - in the form of a unified reporting platform...
The IBCS® standards are proving helpful in standardizing reporting within a company and thus facilitating the evaluation...
Defining entrepreneurial goals (e.g. increasing sales by 5...
