Fabian Pattberg

Tag Archives - GRI conference

Integrated Reporting: Three points to consider

June 7, 20104:23 pm

1 Comment

Last week was a washout for me. I was either on the road travelling or sick in bed. This obviously wasn’t a good time to write a post on the reflection of integrated reporting discussion that went on at the GRI conference back at the end of May in Amsterdam. This week I am a lot better and did set some time aside for this post.

Current situation with integrated reporting
merge Integrated Reporting: Three points to consider Integrated reporting is a very hot topic at the moment. Why? The GRI and some other organizations (here is the link to my post about this) have decided to put their full weight behind the adoption of integrated reporting (Integrated reporting = Consolidating financial and non financial reporting) in the foreseeable future. This is a very significant step for these global standard organizations to get behind integrated reporting as one single supporter.

About Integrated Reporting

  • More information about integrated reporting can be found here on the wikipedia page.
  • If you are interested in reading the GRI announcement in more details please follow this link.

Three points to consider within the current discussion about integrated reporting

  • Having witnessed the promotion of the new integrated reporting push at the GRI conference I must say I am surprised. Surprised to see such a big push for this now. Why are looking at a promotion of this now? Have these large supporters given up on supporting the current bet practice in reporting?
  • Another point is that the whole concept of integrated reporting heavily relies on the experience of the corporate reporter and the reporting organization. In my opinion is it absolutely vital for the current integrated reporting discussion to focus on bringing the know how and experience from current Sustainability reporting over to the integrated reporting teams. So far I have not heard anyone making this so crucial point.
  • The scope of integrated reporting is not defined at the moment. We need to put more effort in developing this scope in order to have a clear guidance what and how to report financial and non-financial reporting in a way that is accessible and easy to read.

These are just three of the points I wanted to raise in this post. What do you about these points and whole concept of integrated reporting?

A little side note to end this post.
 I have just registered the four domain names listed below to make sure they are not being snapped up by speculators as already happened with the integratedreporting.com domain name unfortunately.

The domain names I have registered today for further use:
IntegratedReporting.info
Integrated-Reporting.com
IntegratedReport.com
Integrated-Report.com

If you are interested in any of these domains and would like to develop a website with useful information about integrated reporting please feel free to get in touch. I am more then happy to help you in order to promote best practice in this field. My other domains can be found here. If you want to have a more extensive browse of my current portfolio. All of these domain are available for sale or rent or co-development.

Picture Credit: thetruthabout

Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference 2010

May 28, 20102:53 pm

4 Comments

Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference where two days full of individual sessions about specific topics ranging from UNGC and the GRI to XBRL and Sustainability reporting and a plenary session to wrap it up. We as participants where able to pick and choose sessions we where most interested in. A really good plan after a long day of plenary presentations on Day 1. Identifying key themes was therefore quite difficult but I picked up three different themes during these two days that I wanted to share with everyone.

gri conf Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference 2010 Key themes I came across on day 2 and 3 of the conference:

  • Stakeholder Engagement especially using Social Media is a difficult thing to get right. This became very clear during the session about the future of stakeholder engagement using interactive technology on Day 2. Here some participants and panelists including Joe Confino from the Guardian Newspaper, Martin Smith from JustMeans went head to head with the SAP representative on the question whether the latest SAP report was a step in the right direction for promote stakeholder engagement. A very heated but really interesting discussion. SAP was not on the panel but Jo Confino picked their latest report to show that sophisticated Sustainability reporting is not aways easy to do. I do not agree with Joe but he made some interesting points and so did the SAP representative. All in all proper stakeholder engagement.
  • Integrated reporting was also the topic over the last two days. I did not attend any sessions specifically about this but speaking to many people about the announcement of the GRI to fully support the adoption of integrated reporting it is very clear that the adoption of integrated reporting will be the next big goal of governance bodies and think tanks in this field. But I also got the feeling that financial and non financial accounting are very likely to be ‘forced’ to work together. I am still highly skeptical about the usefulness of integrated reporting but I am happy to be convinced that this is the way to go for the future.
  • The future is in our hands and the GRI needs to play a role in shaping this future. The plenary session to end the conference really asked the right question. Where do we go from here? The aspects that where covered where pretty different as there was a good range of speakers but the overall message was that we need to do something now and not wait any longer. And the GRI and the aspect of integrated reporting are playing a crucial role in this.

Another big event here was the GRI Readers Choice (RCA) Awards and they are all from Brazil! Yes you read right… all from Brazil.

These are the winners of the RCA Awards:

  • The RCA Most Effective Report Award winner is Banco Bradesco
  • The RCA Investor Award winner is Banco do Brasil
  • RCA Best Overall Report Award is Banco do Brasil
  • The RCA Value Chain Award is won by Natura Cosmeticos from Brayil
  • The RCA civil society award goes to Vale from (what a surprise) from Brazil!

In Summary:

All in all this was a very interesting conference. I am feeling very fortunate to be able to spend my day networking, discussing and learning more about Sustainability and CSR topics. And this is what a conference should be. For me it was about getting into detail on some of the topics such as XBRL, Social Media and this is what the conference was able to provide. Looking forward to the next one in 2011!

People on Twitter that also attend the GRI conference next week

May 21, 20102:43 pm

5 Comments

I am attending the Global Reporting (GRI) conference next week. While doing some preparation for the session I will be moderating at the conference I wondered who is going to the conference that is also on Twitter and/or a reader of my blog. I had no clue.
The purpose of today’s post is to feature a list of people that I know are going to the conference. I believe that this list will be very helpful to some of you in order to connect while being at the conference.
But here is the important bit:  I rely on you to tell me other people that are going to be in Amsterdam next week. So please either comment or send me a message through the About page template. This list will be edited by me as we approach the conference and during the time of the conference.
Here is the list of people I know that are on Twitter  and will also be at the GRI conference:

GRI People on Twitter that also attend the GRI conference next week

Please let me know whether there is anyone you know on Twitter that is going as well. I will then add this person or organisation and update this list continuously.