Why report the business?
Submitted by bcfc on December 4th, 2009
20th century management lays reporting structures over the business
Since the business is not organized or managed today, the actual business cannot be reported. Management reporting is against the myriad of organization, management, administrative, and other structures laid over the business. Each structure employs its own terminology and information systems to produce reports on the structure. This produces a myriad of unrelated management reports for plans, business processing, resource planning and utilization, manufacturing, supply chains, customer relationships, accounting, quality control, financial management, human resource management, information technology management and on and on. The reporting possibilities create information complexity with no specific framework to relate all the reporting. Despite all the reports and complexity, there is no direct reporting on the actual business.
We try to bring together information from the diverse structures by adding special 20th century reporting structures, such as:
- Performance management: Control panels, dashboards, scorecards and various other structures to capture and report information
- Strategic enterprise management: Structures to consolidate defined information from specific information systems
- Data reconciliation: Structures to gather and redefine inconsistent data from diverse systems
- Decision support and drill down: Structures to allow management to search and find information in diverse systems
- Categorization: Structures laid over information to reconcile and restructure information and to manage records, documents, reports, content, and other information sub-sets
These various reporting structures and supporting information systems constitute a large overhead and contribute to rather than solving information and business complexity problems. Management information produced is inconsistent, inaccurate, and incomplete in terms of what is actually happening in the business.
Business management reporting must be against the current and planned business
In order to report the business the actual business must be organized, planned, directed, and controlled as explained in previous articles. Actual business reporting is provided by reporting the three components of the business:
- Results: The economic outputs of value and quality produced across the business
- Capital: The investments in capital as specific solutions that must be acquired and developed to provide the capability to produce future results and that must be utilized in business performance to produce actual results
- Performance: The deployment and utilization of a specific capital solution to incur costs and provide effectiveness in producing a specific result in a performance domain
The business can be reported only by organizing the actual business as current results produced, invested capital available to the business, and performance in the utilization of a capital solution to produce a result. [more...].

