intelligent measurement

Measuring Relationships: A Future Auditing Measure?

December 4, 2006 at 9:34 pm 4 comments

Now this may not seem gripping… but I wanted to talk about future global financial reporting and public company auditing procedures – no, please do read on.

There has been a recent initiative “Global Public Policy Symposium” from all the big accounting / auditing firms and regulators to look at how company financial reporting should be done in the future.

They speak about the value of “intangible assets” that should figure in future reporting:

“The value of many companies resides in various “intangible” assets (such as employee creativity and loyalty, and relationships with suppliers and customers). However information to assess the value of these intangibles is not consistently reported”

If you are really keen, read the full report here (pdf)>>

And they go on to conclude that company reporting should in the future include measures on customer and employee satisfaction – and – relationships with key publics.

The idea of measuring relationships and their value is nothing new: there are a number of studies in this area – with the most well known being the Linder Childers and Jim Grunig guidelines on measuring relationships (although a number of points have recently been disputed by Joy Chia (pdf)).

And let’s not forget that David Phillips was way ahead of the auditors when he wrote in 1992 that relationships should be included as intangible assets of an organisation.

Will the auditors adopt a standard measure for relationships? Well, at least they have plenty of work already to draw from.

Glenn

Entry filed under: Communication evaluation, PR evaluation.