Online business reporting: An information management perspective

Online business reporting and the benefits thereof are widely reported in the academic and practitioner literatures. Much is made of its potential to transform information supply and demand and the dominant focus of the current discourse is on the automation and publishing aspects of online business reporting. These we argue are necessary aspects but present a narrow conception of the role of business information in organisations. Current research lacks an information management perspective, which focuses attention on the design, management and intellectual organisation of business information. Drawing on a preliminary study of the adoption and implementation of business reporting markup languages (in particular XBRL) in the Australian financial sector we draw out the issues for research and practice. We present a complementary perspective that makes information and information work visible and takes into account the complex inter-relationships between the activities of humans and the information itself.