Istorm – Idea and Reference Architecture Approaching Inter-organisational Sustainability Reporting

The paper describes an approach for inter-organisational sustainability reporting. This approach is based on an open source software tool “Sustainable Online Reporting Model” developed at the University of Oldenburg. The idea of sustainability reporting across a single reporting entity like a company originated from the field of financial reporting. Later on Kasperzak (2003) presented an approach in which a network of corporations is treated as a single economic entity with the aim to get an extended consolidated financial statement. This approach is considered to fuel current discussions in sustainability reporting around issues like: Where to set reporting boundaries and how to enlarge reporting entities. This paper is research in progress. First, the idea of inter-organisational sustainability reporting is presented. The focus here is to enlarge reporting boundaries to an inter-organisational entity and to create a sustainability report covering an inter-organisational perspective. Such report from a collective perspective opens a window of new opportunities and provides added value compared to current sustainability reports of single entities. Second, a reference architecture for an “Inter-organisational Sustainable Online Reporting Model” is proposed.