In examining why this change will occur, let’s start with some background. “Doing business” is all about collaboration, on which my colleague Mark Smith commented in an earlier perspective. Before communication technologies began to eliminate the constraints of time and space, people relied mainly face-to-face collaboration. (Postal letters were another option but they were very slow and limited interaction.) Voice mail was the first breakthrough in enabling people to collaborate quickly across time and space. Busy individuals could conduct conversations through a series of voice messages, discussing an issue in some depth and agreeing on an approach without speaking in real time. Much of business investment in information technology over the past two decades has been aimed at enabling good communications among different elements located in separate buildings, cities and even countries. The same is true for finance.

We all know that the eruption of social media – in both group settings like Facebook and one-to-many channels such as Twitter – has changed the dynamics of how people – especially those under the age of 40 – communicate. A couple of years ago, a group of teenage girls became trapped in a sewer under Adelaide, Australia. It took several hours to rescue them because the one with a phone used it to post their plight on her Facebook page rather than call someone. This example may be extreme, but it illustrates intergenerational differences in expectations of how one communicates. As with IM, software companies that build business applications are beginning to include Facebook- and Twitter-like capabilities to support collaboration. Examples include application platforms such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter, IBM’s Connections and stand-alone software that can be integrated with another vendor’s offering such as Socialtext that is now owned by Peoplefluent. Software that fosters collaboration can improve efficiency, for example, by resolving issues faster or finding easier or less expensive alternatives to addressing a need. It can improve effectiveness by improving customer satisfaction or enabling more informed decisions sooner. It can foster better alignment across business units as well across and within departments by enabling closer communications among their people.

Social collaboration is off to an encouraging start, but it’s easy to see where improvements are needed, especially to be useful to the finance function. Ideally, collaboration software will be able to understand the context of the work at hand, the role of the individual participant and the relationships the individual has with others in that context. A technology like Google Glass has the potential to enable a manager, while reviewing a report, to see that there have been comments posted related to specific numbers, text or charts and then select and read these just by moving his or her eyes.

As well, software imbued with social collaboration capabilities should understand and automatically manage the various types of relationships among individuals. For example, people in a company typically have a general role (“I’m in Finance”) and one or more task-specific ones (“I’m the director of financial planning and analysis”). Some relationships are persistent while others begin and end with a project. Issues that arise may be open to all or confined to specific groups, subsets of groups or a private dialogue. Queries or comments may be general, specific or somewhere in between. Some conversations, especially in finance and tax departments, must be tightly controlled. Software that understands the context of the work performed and automates the process of managing the who, what and when of the communications will support more effective collaboration, faster completion of tasks, greater situational awareness with the organization and as a result better decision-making.

Which brings me back to the relevance of social collaboration for finance professionals. There are many use cases for comprehensive collaboration capabilities in ERP or accounting and financial performance management software. A good deal (maybe too much) of what goes on operationally in finance departments involves checking details and correcting errors – activities that require direct communications. Resolving billing issues could be streamlined if receivables and sales or payables and purchasing were connected to the appropriate collaborative network in the context of executing business processes. For example, end-of-period reconciliations could proceed faster if communications among the right people in the departments involved less effort. The financial close has multiple steps where time saved by resolving snags or clearing up ambiguities consistently can have a meaningful impact on shortening the process. Likewise, planning and review involve a great deal of collaboration, especially in understanding assumptions and expectations or providing perspectives on causal factors behind better or worse than expected results.

Unlike those in sales and marketing, the stereotypical accountant and finance specialist is not thought of as “social.” And at the moment, few people working in finance departments say that social collaboration capabilities are very important to their jobs. An important aspect of my research agenda for this year points to the need to address the demographic shift from executives and managers from the baby-boom generation to those who grew up with computer technology. These shifts will drive demand for a new generation of software, one that emphasizes IT-enabled collaboration, mobility and agility. Social collaboration used in business applications should be more than a Facebook metaphor. It addresses a key drawback of instant messaging systems: the fact that in business, individuals have multiple roles and multiple networks of people with whom they interact. When tightly integrated into business software of all kinds, social collaboration will become an essential capability by enabling people to resolve issues faster and with less effort than other means of communication. Vendors that focus on the finance function should ignore today’s lack of enthusiasm for social but more practical collaborative capabilities and ensure that their software is designed for the next generation of financial software users.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research

Moreover, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have increased their oversight of bribery. At the beginning of 2013 they jointly issued the Resource Guide to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. For its part, the SEC has stepped up enforcement using its own resources. Recently, it charged a group of bond traders with enabling a Venezuelan finance official to embezzle millions of dollars by disguising the money as fees paid to the broker/dealer to handle apparently legitimate transactions. Tellingly, though, there was another relatively recent bribery issue that involved Morgan Stanley where the SEC declined to include that company in an enforcement action because it had demonstrated diligence to prevent it.

Before anticorruption laws, it was expedient for corporations to pay government officials to close business, get preferred status or prevent punishment. Once the laws were established, that stopped being the case. However, from a management standpoint, compliance with the law became complicated because of the dual nature of the corporation, which is both an entity and a group of individuals. In the case of the latter, when an individual breaks the law, is that person at fault, is the corporation or are both? Regardless of how a case is decided, there can be severe reputational damage to a company found violating the law, and that will have repercussions for corporate boards and executives.

This question leads to the agency dilemma, an important consideration in enterprise risk management. Economists long ago recognized the agency dilemma when the modern corporation separated the roles of its principals (that is, the shareholders) from its management. The agency issue exists where the best interests of the principals are either not aligned or in conflict with the interests of the agents (the professional managers running the corporation). But agency issues also extend to the company’s executives and may be rife in any large-scale business. Within the management group, authority to act independently is delegated down through the hierarchy, and the interests of the lower-level managers may be in conflict with those of senior executives, the board of directors and shareholders. For example, suppose that a local manager believes his performance evaluation, compensation and prospects for promotion hinge on the timely opening of a new facility. Confronted with a culture of payoffs for permits, that manager may try to find a way to pay officials for expedited consideration, especially if he is local to the area. From that individual’s perspective, corrupt activity may be the norm, and he may believe himself to be clever enough to violate company policy without detection.

It was once acceptable for a company to claim that it had a stated policy prohibiting bribery and that executives were ignorant of an employee’s actions. Absent proof to the contrary, that often was enough. However, the FCPA changed this norm, imposing the need for diligence and affirmative actions on the part of companies to prevent employees from breaking the law as well as to detect and report any such violations that do occur (which is how the Wal-Mart situation came to light). Public standards, too, have changed since the 1970s. Despite its self-disclosure after the fact and the steps it took to address the corrupt behavior, Wal-Mart suffered severe reputational damage. Yet even with the likelihood potential consequences, our benchmark research reveals that just 6 percent of companies have effective controls for managing reputational risk.

We assert that the most effective control is to prevent illegal activity from taking place at all. Short of that, companies that can demonstrate that they have taken all reasonable steps to prevent a violation of the law are in a better position to claim that the individual, not the company, is at fault.

An organization should have clearly articulated and documented antibribery and corruption policies and procedures, institute mandatory training of and signed acknowledgements of having taken it by executives and managers, and put in place incentives and disciplinary measures. However, these required measures are increasingly insufficient to demonstrate diligence in preventing corrupt activities. Companies also must have a software-supported internal control system that flags suspicious activity immediately and triggers a rigorous remediation process that analyzes, investigates and documents the disposition of each incident. Incidents that are detected long after their commission are more difficult to cope with and pose much higher legal, financial and reputational risk.

Software is available that helps detect activities that violate anticorruption laws and regulations as they occur or shortly thereafter; this is far more effective than waiting for internal audits or (worse still) whistleblowers to uncover malfeasance. To prevent violations of the FCPA and other antibribery statues, corporations must be able to monitor their financial and other systems for warning signs. These applications take advantage of operational intelligence, a class of analytical capabilities built on event-focused information-gathering that can uncover suspicious actions as they occur. Our research on innovating with operational intelligence shows that companies use an array of systems (led by IT systems management and major enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM) to track events, analyze them, report results and create alerts when conditions warrant them, as detailed in the related chart. The research also shows that about half (53%) use 11  or more information sources in implementing their operational intelligence efforts. In the future, effective FCPA software increasingly will need to look at a wider range of internal data as well as information from external sources and social media to determine, for example, whether a consulting company that just received a finder’s fee is run by or employs a relative of a government official. Today, companies can utilize software from large vendors such as IBM, Oracle and SAP, as well as vendors with FCPA-specific software such as Compliancy and Oversight Systems.

Bribery and corruption are unlikely to disappear entirely. Regardless of anyone’s best intentions, corporate boards and executives can find themselves enmeshed in a scandal not of their own devising. The best defense in such cases is plain evidence that the organization has done everything reasonable to prevent its occurrence and has discovered and dealt with it promptly if it does. Policies and training are vital components, but software can be the extra component necessary to improve the effectiveness of monitoring and auditing to support anticorruption efforts.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research

Discretion Manager helps loan agents set and adapt pricing terms and conditions to optimize the trade-off between loan volumes and margin, based on the preferences and characteristics of the lender. By dynamically recalculating the impact of changes on any number of terms being offered, agents are able to price more effectively. By tracking every negotiation, the system enables the agent’s company to capture competitive market intelligence and evolve its pricing tactics to respond to changing conditions. Discretion Manager can be accessed on a tablet, reflecting the vendor’s awareness of the need for mobility in situations such as automobile lending.

Nomis provides price and revenue optimization (PRO) software and services to financial services companies, including banks, automobile credit providers and credit card processors. Financial services is a distinct segment in PRO because customer attitudes and behavior with respect to money are distinct from those they have toward, say, travel and leisure or general merchandise. Especially for lending and insurance, adverse selection is a characteristic that should be incorporated into pricing models, but it rarely is. Riskier borrowers, for example, are more willing to pay higher interest rates so it’s important for the lender to ensure that pricing reflects the degree of principal risk it is undertaking.

Price optimization is based on a concept that is simple to describe but difficult to execute because even buyers with identical demographic characteristics (such as age, income or location) may have different degrees of price sensitivity. In the case of financial services, for example, those with low price sensitivity may place more value on other characteristics of a transaction. These may include service levels or service bundles, features (specific terms and conditions such as prepayment flexibility), convenience or brand values (including security, reliability or efficiency). By appropriately structuring its offers, a financial services company can get closer to its optimal trade-off between volume and risk-adjusted profitability. Nomis claims that it has been able to increase the net interest margins of its customers by five to 25 basis points (0.05% to 0.25%) over the course of a business or interest rate cycle; such an improvement has a meaningful impact on an institution’s return on equity. Margin improvement is partly the result of replacing top-down static pricing approaches (such as weekly or monthly price books sent out by headquarters) with a system that learns and recalibrates optimal terms even for multiple-variant offerings (such as size of down payment, initial and long-term interest rates and length of loan) based on real-time market feedback.

The development and growing sophistication of packaged PRO applications has been one of the most important advances in business analytics over the past decade. The potential benefits of such systems are widespread and evident. At its most basic level, PRO software allows companies to vary the price they offer according to an assessment of the price sensitivity of the individual buyer. Those assumed to be more sensitive are shown a lower price than those who are insensitive. Today’s products can accommodate differences in the context of offerings, especially variations on initial pricing and discount. For example, some customers prefer “everyday low prices” while others crave coupons and discounts. These are retail pricing approaches, but the same tactics apply to consumer banking and finance. In the end, the lender may receive exactly the same amount of revenue, but using the right pricing dynamics to attract a customer can make all the difference in getting the business. Nomis has been increasing its attention to managing the dynamics of the pricing discussion, which can be especially important for auto loans and other consumer finance products.

Optimization methodologies such as PRO are a natural fit for the application of big data analytics. Focus on this topic has increased in recent years because of the opportunity to gain ongoing actionable insights from the mass of data created by internal systems and publicly available data (such as social media). Our benchmark research shows that three-fourths of companies are addressing more than 10 gigabytes of data per day and 10 percent are already dealing with a terabyte or more. It requires sifting through large data sets to collect consumer behavior characteristics that will enable a company to identify customer segments and quantify their price sensitivity. These complex calculations require software designed for the purpose, but most in the financial services industry rely on older methods that produce less than optimal results. Big data analytics software can help organizations more closely manage the process of defining offers to customers (and the levels of discretion they allow to account managers and sales people) and the terms and conditions of the transaction.

The conceptual framework for PRO is well established. The challenge is in putting it into practice. For example, it’s not always easy to get reliable data about historical transactions, identify segments correctly and regularly update the data to reflect changes in markets, competitive moves and model refinements. There’s a change management aspect to PRO as well. Changing how an organization interacts with customers to take best advantage of technology can be challenging. For example, the best customers of a bank may be the least price sensitive, yet there’s a tendency to reward them excessively by offering better deals than they need to be satisfied. For that reason, sales incentive management and PRO are highly complementary. I’d say it’s impossible to get full benefit from either without combining them. Incentive management may be the only reliable means to overcome organizational inertia, especially where deep-seated beliefs are concerned.

It seems as if businesses have been struggling with pricing their products and services forever. At the dawn of the Internet age some pundits speculated that the increasing pricing transparency afforded by the Web would drive prices closer together. This hasn’t happened, and vendors are still challenged to set the best price. As well, for decades, financial services companies have been grappling with the difficulty of implementing customer value pricing as a way to deal with the extreme asymmetry of customer profitability in their industry. That is, a small minority of customers are very profitable while most are marginally profitable or even unprofitable. The dilemma facing executives that customer value pricing seeks to address is that some in the larger group can become very profitable if the institution can attract a higher share of their wallets or over time as their age, income and wealth grow. Without the right software it’s never easy to find such diamonds in the rough. Nomis can help financial services companies here, but although software is necessary, it’s not sufficient. Discussions with customers confirm the persistence of intractable cultural and institutional barriers that get in the way of successfully implementing a customer value approach.

Because of the host’s new software release, one area of focus of this year’s forum was managing discretion in setting prices. In many retail settings in western societies, prices are not normally negotiated. However, for many big-ticket consumer items (such as cars and houses), buyers usually expect to negotiate the price with the seller. In these cases, companies need to decide to what degree to give their agents discretion to negotiate charges, terms and conditions. There’s a high degree of dissatisfaction among business executives with how to apply discretion to the negotiation process to optimize revenues and profits; many suspect that too much discretion erodes margins. One reason for this distrust is poor application of incentive management to the process. Much of it, though, stems from a failure to understand buyers’ price elasticity and the optimal method of presenting prices in terms of list and discount in managing a negotiation. As noted, even for the identical product offered by the same company, for some customers it’s better to quote a high list price and offer a sizable discount while for others a more moderate list price and a limited discount works best. Nomis can help manage the dynamics of the price presented and discounts offered in a way that optimizes revenue and pricing.

Price and revenue optimization is only beginning to mature in industries other than travel and hospitality. While some financial services companies run their own internal PRO efforts, most don’t have the resources, desire or ability to do this in-house. Yet there is evidence of the value of PRO as an effective profitability management tool in the financial services industry. The need for banks and other financial institutions to increase their returns on assets and therefore equity in today’s challenging and more regulated environment makes PRO a vital tool. Financial services firms should take steps to incorporate more effective pricing as part of their strategy and consider Nomis Solutions to provide the analytical and operational underpinnings of such an effort.

Regards,

Robert Kugel

SVP Research

Infor has addressed the economies-of-scale issue with its loosely coupled, XML-based ION middleware. Introduced in 2011, ION is an elegant method for integrating the data and process elements of the disparate pieces of Infor’s portfolio. (And of other software, too: Half of Infor’s customers use it to integrate with other vendors’ software.) ION has made it easier and less costly, for example, for Infor’s ERP customers to add its financial performance management software, according to our Value Index analysis. This cross-selling had been at the core of the company’s strategy from the start but needed a practical solution to make it work; ION supplied that.

Innovation is the other important issue that Infor needed to address. The numerous incremental technology advances that have taken place over the past decade, combined with the rise of the “millennials” and the retirement of the Baby Boomers in the workforce, are driving fundamental changes in how people expect to work with software. This shift is a key part of my research agenda for this year.

Nothing says “modern” like the Cloud. Most observers now recognize that corporations will continue to pick and choose how they deploy software and data for quite some time. Our benchmark research into business technology innovation confirms that organizations have different preferences in how they deploy information technology, as the chart shows. In some cases, such as analytics, they prefer on-premises by a substantial margin, while the cloud rules for social media. Many companies that won’t dream of having their ERP and financial management systems in the cloud are long-time users of Salesforce.

Infor has made strides in addressing this situation. For example, Inforce is a native Force.com tool that connects Salesforce with Infor’s back-office applications. Inforce enables a company to automate management of, say, the full scope of a sales order process that begins as an opportunity in Salesforce and ends with posting all details of the completed transaction in the company’s ERP system. This structure eliminates the need to rekey data and enables controls such as credit limit approvals to be enforced. Similarly, Infor recently announced Sky Vault, an offering based on Amazon Web Services’ Redshift. Sky Vault is a cloud-based variation of Infor’s Business Vault, a dedicated repository for data generated by any transaction system (not just Infor’s). Business Vault offers users a way to immediately access a full range of company data for analysis and reporting. When it is formally launched in the second half of this year Sky Vault will provide a cloud-based repository that includes prebuilt, industry- and function-specific business analytics, reports and dashboards. Its purpose is to give users low-cost big data capabilities. Our research shows that corporations are increasingly looking at big data technologies to retain and analyze more corporate data, increase the speed of analysis of that data and make it more accurate.

Simply having a cloud-based offering or an approach to big data is less important than what you do with it. To that end Infor has focused on improving the efficiency with which people use its software (one metric being the number of clicks required to perform a process) as well as making “beautiful apps,” in what it is calling “the SoHo Experience” created by its internal creative design organization. The dull, cluttered and difficult-to-navigate interfaces of the past were the result of inexperience in design and constrained computing resources. Today, it’s important to apply basic concepts of industrial design and ergonomics to creating user interfaces. This goes beyond making old code bases pretty. Largely because of tablets and mobile computing platforms, people now work with multiple types of interfaces and use a wider range of methods and gestures to interact with their devices. Today’s software design must reflect these changes. Having a modern user experience also makes it easier for Infor to attract customers and deflect claims that it is selling warmed-over applications that it acquired, which would have been a competitive vulnerability had it taken a more conventional approach.

Enhanced business collaboration for every part of the organization increasingly is a key requirement for software, and Infor is at work here also. Its Ming.le social collaboration software provides the means to connect groups of people within a workforce to achieve faster communication and more effective interaction in the context of specific issues or processes supported by computing systems. Instant messaging evolved from teenagers passing electronic notes to their friends into an easier way for business people to connect faster than through phones and email. Similarly, social collaboration is now more than a Facebook metaphor and addresses a key drawback to instant messaging systems. Individuals have multiple roles and multiple networks of people with whom they interact. Some relationships are tight, but others are transient. Some may be focused on a general topic such as marketing and therefore include a large and possibly diffuse group, while others such as performing reconciliations in the financial close process have a defined and controlled set of members. Well-designed social collaboration software can manage all of these types of interactions and enable people to resolve issues faster and with less effort than other means of communication.

As well, Infor has been building out mobility applications for extending functionality to people and functions that aren’t confined to a desk, such as a shop-floor tablet application, proof of delivery, requisitions and field service, to name a few. Mobility is rapidly becoming a table-stakes capability expected by software customers.

Integration and innovation support Infor’s core strength, which has been – and will continue to be – a customer base that values Infor’s highly specialized offerings. Infor’s “micro-vertical” strategy suits midsize companies (and midsize divisions of larger corporations) that have limited IT budgets yet want their specialized requirements addressed without having to pay a premium for customization and configuration. Many types of business adapt well to standard software, and all major ERP software companies have built industry-specific variations of their software offering over the past two decades. But milk and beer, for instance, remain two very different types of beverages with distinct requirements. Likewise steel service is a distinct form of distribution, and different types of industrial equipment dealers have specific requirements. Even Lawson’s S3 customers are focused in businesses such as government and healthcare that are people-intensive and therefore must manage the complexities associated with rapidly evolving workforce relationships.

Addressing micro-vertical specific requirements in business analytics, planning and control software will enable Infor to continue increasing its penetration of these products into its installed base. For example,  by deploying Infor’s financial management software, one longstanding ERP customer I spoke with was able to shave half a day from its accounting close in part because it was able to automate more and eliminate 300 spreadsheets that were used in the process. Rather than have three people spend a half day each creating spreadsheet reports that were distributed to individuals by email, reports are generated automatically and individuals can retrieve them from a central repository. In addition, the company controller is now able to complete the management accounting narratives half a day earlier, making critical information available sooner than before. All of this is consistent with our research that demonstrates the value of automation in accelerating the financial close process, as shown in the chart. Across its range of micro-verticals Infor offers off-the-rack basic dashboards and reports tailored to the businesses requirements of its customers. Another example of cross-sell potential is its Approva continuous monitoring software, which can be especially useful for government, education and nonprofits. Unlike most businesses that pay expenses from a common pot, almost all of these entities must use funds-based accounting, so it’s necessary to keep tabs on these individual funds’ balances for specific programs, departments and so on to avoid overspending.

None of what Infor has added over the past two years is groundbreaking technology or a revolutionary approach to enterprise computing compared to what’s available in the broader marketplace. On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be. The changes it has made offer existing customers substantial advantages for sustaining and even expanding Infor’s footprint in their organization. From the perspective of private equity investors and bondholders, this has been and continues to be the most critical aspect of the company’s business strategy. Without it, their investment in Infor would be doomed. And in this respect current leadership has succeeded where the previous management group did not. All of the steps in modernizing and upgrading the products have been achieved at a critical time. The prices paid for software companies in the consolidation of the past decade were based on the assumption of a long stream of annual maintenance payments. However, new technology and a new generation of buyers with more demanding requirements put those dependable maintenance streams in peril. Vendors can no longer assume that they will sustain their current share of wallet without adding functionality and capabilities as well as eliminating ancillary ownership costs (for example, by reducing customization and implementation costs).

The company’s senior executives appeared much more at ease this year than in the past, which might be an indicator that business is improving. But it’s hard to know for certain because Infor is a closely held corporation and is not required to routinely disclose its financial statements. Presenters declined to answer specific questions about the financial performance this year. However, Infor filed its fiscal 2012 financials with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a result of an exchange offer for its debt last year. The company data relates to its fiscal 2012, which ended that May 31, so the information is now almost a year old. The S-4 filing shows the company had revenues of $2.5 billion, a 35% increase over the prior year. This reflected increased demand for software generally but also renewed confidence in the company’s future as well as the Lawson Software acquisition, without which the top line would have been up 24%. Infor’s income statement had been holding its own under the weight of heavy interest expense related to debt taken on to fund acquisitions and a substantial investment in R&D. In fiscal 2012 it lost money on a reported basis but was slightly above break-even when noncash and nonrecurring items are excluded, as well as solidly profitable before interest expense. The numbers also illustrate the substantial investment Infor has made in R&D, which rose by $115 million to $322 million, representing 13% of revenues, up from 11% in the previous two years. For Infor to go public, the company would have to demonstrate ongoing organic revenue growth and prospects for more in the future. One reason for going public would be to retire the company’s high-cost debt, which would allow more spending on sales and marketing focused on gaining new customers.

Infor appears to have come a long way toward achieving the objective of making a very challenging enterprise software rollup work. The first, relatively easy step was buying a set of unsustainably small software companies at reasonable prices. The more recent, much more difficult step has been to make the technology and product design investments needed to transform solid but stodgy intellectual property into a modern software suite. I’ve been describing Infor as “the largest software company you never heard of,” but I expect that won’t be true much longer.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research

Those with long memories may recall that in the 1990s the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented a “plain English” requirement that replaced then-prevailing legalese with something easier for laymen to understand. But despite this mandate, unless you’re familiar with them, these financial filings can be daunting documents to navigate and understand. Financial filings must conform to a structure defined by regulatory authorities to be all-encompassing and to obey an exhaustive list of requirements that may not be relevant to general readers. Every company required to file financial statements with the SEC, for example, must have a section on mine safety disclosures – even Apple and McDonald’s. Thus the filings contain a mass of information that in its totality may not be useful or even comprehensible to those without formal training in financial analysis. An integrated report can address this unwieldiness, being more concise in presenting details, more discerning in presenting risks and more comprehensive in presenting strategy, opportunities and salient trends in its external environment.

The IIRC’s work is still at the draft stage, so it’s hard to know how the design of the integrated report will evolve and how responsive it will be to the needs of companies creating them and people reading them. Its backers recognize that many elements of the concept are foreign to people who are used to creating financial reports to shareholders. Beyond that, however, there are important cultural differences that will make it difficult to gain consistent adoption worldwide. For example, compared to European ones, corporate “stakeholders” have fewer rights (either statutory or by consent) in most countries with an Anglo-Saxon corporate tradition. In some countries and/or industries, employees own their jobs, not just their labor. Companies that are consumer-oriented, depend on government largesse or are heavily regulated must be more sensitive to public perception than those that aren’t. The latter may be far less willing to disclose details of, say, long-range capital spending plans if they consider them proprietary, particularly if their competitors aren’t doing the same. Especially in countries with a litigious tradition (such as the United States), it may be hard for internal legal counsel to sign off on a list of risks and opportunities without copious disclaimers and case law that extends “safe harbor” provisions to these reports. If there is a contemporary SEC filing with a concise risks section, I haven’t found it. And then there’s likely to be an overarching concern about achieving accuracy and comparability between companies’ reports in areas where standards are not well developed, such as in measures of sustainability. Organizations such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) are in the process of developing these standards, but they are not yet fully available.

As we know, corporate reports of all kinds these days depend on information technology. It is for those involved in preparing them to wonder whether their company will need new reporting tools to conform to this reporting framework. In our view, the answer is, Probably not. Corporations will still be using the same sort of data stores, reporting tools, spreadsheets and balanced scorecards that they use now to manage the data that will go into an integrated report. In fact our research into organizations find that spreadsheets are used quite frequently (74%) that I have already indicated the importance of finding alternatives. Yet they likely will need to capture different categories of internal operating data and of external industry and general economic data. Creating such a report would be another use case for “close-to-disclose” software that many organizations are currently using to prepare their financial regulatory filings. As well, companies that create integrated reports should plan on making these available on interactive Web pages, as I have discussed before, not just on paper or static Internet reports.

Skeptics may view integrated reporting as just a fad, but there is a real need for it. Management accounting, which looks forward and is designed to serve the needs of executives and managers rather than shareholders, is now an outdated reporting method introduced more than a century ago. Still, it’s not clear that integrated reporting has a bright future. Calls for more socially aware reporting methods in the past have gone nowhere, and this may be the latest futile iteration. The idea is bound to encounter resistance. For the average U.S.-based corporate counsel, for example, integrated reporting may be fraught with terror, since, despite its good intentions, it opens up a potential avenue for lawsuits and attempts by outside groups to hijack corporate governance. In many emerging markets, financial reports to shareholders are far more opaque than in developed ones. It’s not clear how forthcoming their integrated reports will be and how accurate the more difficult-to-audit components will be. Consequently, corporations that are not susceptible to public or consumer pressure may be balk at adopting integrated reporting without a legal requirement and legal protections. That noted, senior corporate and finance executives should continue to monitor the progress of the integrated report to be prepared for changes it could bring.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research