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Business Information Design
Transparent and standardized
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Roland J. Merz
Managing Director / Vice Chairman
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Information Design in Reporting
The purpose of Information Design is to make available information in a clear, transparent and standardised manner. With Rolf Hichert, HICHERT®SUCCESS, the International Business & Communication Standards (IBCS), the topic is now also coming to the fore for companies in the German-speaking region, and a re-evaluation appears to be taking place. Effective and efficient information processing is crucial with respect to the reporting for corporate controlling purposes. Business Information Design should aim at producing documents that are comparable, allow fast and accurate access and can be translated easily into effective measures. This requires automated and standardised solutions, which are technically perfected, yet agile and innovative. Furthermore, the information recipients should be enabled to find a convenient way of accessing their personalised information in a fast, straightforward and transparent manner.
To meet these challenges, more and more companies are taking the decision to revise their reporting structures and to configure them with a view to the future. CubeServ provides support to its customers and is developing further generic products and analysis applications in the area of Business Information Design. The developed generic approaches can subsequently be tailored to specific customer requirements.
Increasing significance of effective and efficient reporting
According to a recent study by Horváth & Partners, executives in many companies only derive limited support for their decision-making from their own reporting. In a market environment of increasing complexity, it is becoming ever more important to increase transparency for better decision-making at all management levels or to increase efficiency in operational processes as well as being able to recognise opportunities and risks for the company at an early stage.
Reporting should therefore be geared more towards the future and provide future-related statements and prognoses; it should be capable of linking the data from the transaction systems with data sourced from documents/texts, social media or the internet, for example. The reporting should be faster, less laborious and at the same time more flexible and more focused. To meet the needs of the report recipients, the intelligibility of the communicated information and the clarity of its display must be increased. It currently takes too long for information recipients to find their bearings, content is frequently not sufficiently clear and it rarely conveys any useful messages.
Our Approach
CubeServ develops a structured, generic approach and is capable of integrating the developed products, applications and analysis tools, from “big data” to mobile reporting to modern commenting and planning solutions, and devising a customised reporting concept in collaboration with the customer.
Ultimately, the customer receives a well-arranged and clear structure, which will result in more effective and efficient standard and analytical reporting while also offering modern self-service reporting solutions. Any business units that are initially not included can be integrated into the solution at a later date.
As a first step, the approach envisages the creation of transparency through an assessment of the current situation with respect to intelligibility, contents, reporting processes, governance and IT architecture. On the basis of the gained information, a concept will then be developed, potential implications and dependencies in relation to the existing reporting will be identified and the general framework of the future reporting will be defined. Key parameters include the volume, the scope and the number of reports as well as the standardisation and automation of the process flows in the reporting and the checking procedures.
The implementation planning is based on the company’s strategy and controlling logic and will define the contents and the display of the reports, presentations and statistics, determine reporting objects and report recipients, and link the authorisation and migration concept to a frontend tool strategy. The reporting concept is firmly established in the organisation by redefining the tasks involved in the reporting process, from information creation, data collection and data provision to report generation and validation to database-supported commenting.
Our Offer
In future, CubeServ will offer topical and technical consulting services in the area of Business Information Design, either in individual phases or for a wholesale revision of the reporting concept. The offered services range from conducting an assessment to the introduction of design standards as the basis for clearer content communication and display, the revision of individual, complex reports or presentations, or a general revision of the reports in the BI system up to and including the development of dashboards and statistical Web/Excel reports.
Our customers benefit from our long years of implementation competence gained in demanding Business Intelligence projects.