Stakeholders' ever-increasing demands for information on the sustainability of corporate activities are leading to more extensive reporting by companies.

Companies are increasingly explaining their own contribution to social, economic and environmental performance in the form of sustainability reports as part of corporate communications. This development is supported by an EU directive on the disclosure of non-financial information, which is to be transposed into the national laws of the EU member states in 2017 and affects around 6,000 companies in the EU.

In the context of corporate communication with stakeholders, there is an emerging trend for sustainability reporting to prepare information in a way that is tailored to the target group. This represents a hurdle for companies, as the information is often collected from a wide variety of sources within the company and is not prepared for analysing the content (topics, indicators, etc.). However, a standardised report for all target groups is not efficient, so solutions need to be researched that can be applied in practice.

As part of the research cooperation between the Department of Information Systems / Very Large Business Applications at the University of Oldenburg under the direction of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez and Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft under the direction of Dr Daniel-Sascha Roth, research is being conducted into possibilities for interactive and inter-company NBE in the period from 01.04.2014 to 30.06.2015.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Jorge Marx Gómez

• Jad Asswad
• Andreas Solsbach