Reporting systems can provide transparency into financial markets necessary for a sustainable, prosperous global economy. The most widely used global platform for exchanging electronic information about companies to regulatory bodies is XBRL. Standards for this platform are in the process of becoming legally harmonized, but not all countries are mandating e-business reporting. A harmonized global standard for business reporting aligns practices between countries, while recognizing the need for flexibility within each social system and government, whereas international law would establish one standard for all. The research shows that goal of creating transparent global financial information in aggregate searchable form for the public remains elusive under the harmonized approach. The research explores the standardization process at the country level using a grounded theory approach in the G20 countries. The problem of a not having a global standard is framed in the financial reporting dimensions of Law, Accounting Standards, Information Standards, and Assurance Standards, which are existing standards integral to creating high quality transparent financial information. The dimensions exist to some extent in each country, and are in process of being harmonized. The research shows that current legal mandates for the XBRL standard impact the number of firms filing in XBRL to regulators. However, problems with data quality and data assurance have not been addressed with the current legislative initiatives. There is supply of data, but no public demand due to quality issues. There are three levels in the process where data alignment is needed for interoperability: taxonomy use must be consistent, taxonomy structure must be the same, and agreed upon minimum content must be useful for analysis. Currently, data sets between countries are not interoperable or comparable for aggregation due to local adoptions of XBRL taxonomies. Legal mandates alone have not produced quality electronic financial information. Additionally, accounting and assurance standards are not completely aligned. The contributions of this paper provide an understanding of how global standards are being harmonized in the G20 countries based on the common value of financial information transparency in e-business reporting.

Background: Policy initiatives to promote sustainable travel through the use of Internet based public information systems have increased during the last decade. Stockholm, in being one of the first cities in Europe to implement an Internet based service for facilitating sustainable travel is believed to be a good candidate for an analysis of key issues for developing sustainable travel planning services to the public. Aim: This thesis investigates the past development of two Stockholm based public information systems and their services in order to draw lessons on how to better provide for a public information service geared towards facilitating  environmentally sustainable travel planning through information and communications technology. The overall goal of the thesis is to contribute to an understanding on how to better design and manage current and future attempts at facilitating sustainable travel planning services based on historical case studies. Approach: The thesis draws ideas from the concept of organizational responsiveness – an organization’s ability to listen, understand and respond to demands put to it by its internal and external stakeholders – in order to depict how well or not the two public information systems and their owners have adapted to established norms and values of their surroundings. Results: Overall, the findings from the historical case studies suggest that organizations attempting to provide sustainable travel planning to the public need to design and manage their systems in such a way that it responds to shifting demands on how to provide for information. Implementing and embedding new technologies involves complex processes of change both at the micro level – for users and practitioners of the service – and at the meso level for the involved public service organizations themselves. This condition requires a contextualist framework to analyze and understand organizational, contextual and cultural issues involved in the adoption of new technologies and procedures. Conclusions: The thesis concludes with a discussion on how the findings from the historical case studies may provide lessons for both current and future attempts at providing public information systems geared towards facilitating environmentally sustainable travel planning to the public. Historical examples and issues concerning collective intelligence and peer to peer based forms of designing, producing and supervising public information services identified throughout the study are looked upon and discussed in terms of their possible role in increasing the potential for public information services to facilitate sustainable urban transport. / <p>QC 20140319</p> / TRACS, Travel Planner for Sustainable Cities