The BLUEBIRD – IBCS Starter Kit

Do you know the situation of looking at a report and after 5 minutes asking yourself, “What is the artist trying to tell me?” Unfortunately, such a thing is not an exception. The list of possible reporting tools on the market is large, and the visual capabilities that come with the various business intelligence products are just as extensive.

As a result, reports are becoming more diverse and colorful and, unfortunately, losing more and more of their intrinsic meaning.

Art is beautiful and should be encouraged, but there is no room for it in business communications and reporting.

This is exactly where the IBCS® standards come in. IBCS® stands for INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION Standards and is a freely usable set of rules (Creative Commons license) that is intended to regulate the visual design of reports, among other things.

IBCS has its origin in the Hichert® SUCCESS rules developed by Prof. Dr. Rolf Hichert.

In these rules, each letter of the word SUCCESS stands for a special report property that can be standardized.

Compliance with the above rules ensures that the business communication also complies with the IBCS® standards or meets the requirements of the IBCS.

It should be remembered, however, that the IBCS are by no means mandatory, but should be seen as practical suggestions that can be used to design business communications that are generally understandable.

Let’s take the use of colors as an example: The use of colors for reports, dashboards or analyses is of course also permitted under IBCS. However, care should be taken to ensure that colors are only used if there is a recognizable purpose for their use – such as specifically highlighting a product, business unit or month in a list of items. However, certain rules should be followed:

Since their creation, the INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION Standards have become established in many companies (both nationally and internationally) and ensure comprehensible and meaningful corporate communication and reporting.

In general, the IBCS defined standards are used to properly design charts and tables in terms of their content conception, visual perceptibility, and semantic notation. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Communication_Standards)

Even if you cannot or do not want to comply with all IBCS rules for your communication, even small steps in this direction show noticeable effects for small and large, national and international companies.