Inside the International Integrated Reporting Conference

I attended a conference last week. Nothing remarkable in that given that there are many more HE conference attendance opportunities than there are working days in the year, but this was different. For a start, I was one of only five delegates with a connection to universities, and it was in Amsterdam. It might as well have been in Slough or Swindon though, as I didn’t have chance to see the Rijksmuseum or the Oude Kerk, as we spent two full days in a conference centre talking and hearing about Integrated Reporting. The fact that I am pleased to see more attention being paid to narrative reporting is perhaps more remarkable, as I make no secret of disliking management clichés and waffle which often crowd out useful information in corporate publications. But I am convinced that at a time when everyone is talking about “value for money”, we need to separate “value” from the other two words.

This is where Integrated Reporting comes in. To coincide with the conference, the IIRC published a report on CFO Leadership in IR and it is worth a few minutes of your time to read the 20 pages. You might not agree with the bold claim that “[E]mbracing Integrated Reporting gives CFOs the opportunity to become what global accountancy body ACCA calls “changemakers” in their organizations – individuals who have succeeded in “balancing the ownership and lead of their business’s and taking a more entrepreneurial stance within the firm”, but that reaction is good – it is the basis for a debate about whether current reporting styles and requirements are right for today’s economy and today’s stakeholders. The LFHE will shortly announce which HEIs will be part of their project to examine the relevance of Integrated Reporting and Integrated Thinking in higher education and I understand the quality of applications to be involved was very high. This builds on the work that BUFDG started 18 months ago, and brings to the attention of a wider group of senior managers.

There were several very good sessions at the conference, including one by Professor Mervyn King, who spent the first few seconds of his speech explaining that he is not the former Governor of the Bank of England. This self-effacing South African shared some words of wisdom and in the CFO publication he says,

“Integrated thinking can act as an early warning system for businesses, as the management of strategic information becomes more cohesive and silos are reduced. This process will alert boards to significant risks earlier and trigger discussions that otherwise would not occur. By helping to strengthen the foundations of business decision-making, management and performance, integrated thinking is the bridge to a more financially stable and sustainable global economy. The era of isolated non-financial factors, disconnected from strategic risks, business performance and financial stability, is over.”

As we gird ourselves to read the DfE consultation on the OfS powers and activities, due out any day, maybe replacing the word “business” with “university” is not such a strange idea. Students are already taking a keener interest [than their predecessors] in what their university is doing for them and for the world they have inherited. Nicola Dandridge and Shakira Martin agree that students should play a part in the OfS and universities should be prepared with much more information about value. We have been warned!