With that amount of buzzwords in the title, I must be ringing some warning bells in your minds. You would be right to get cautious with what I am going to say here because this is pure speculation. I would like to imagine how annual (quarterly ?) corporate reports should look like in some near future.

In my opinion, they should carry on the current trend on emphasizing corporate social responsability. In order to do so, they should both embrace innovative reporting standards and methodologies and support these methodologies by implementing them with « semantic web »-like technologies. In such a future, it would mean that financial analyst (and eventually stakeholders) should be able to browse through specialized web sites which would aggregate meaningful data published in these corporate reports. In such specialized web sites, investors should be able to compare comparable data, marks and ratings regarding their favorite corporations. They should be given functionalities like the one you find in multidimensional analysis tools (business intelligence), even if they are as simplified as in interactive purchase guides [via Fred]. In such a future, I would be able to subscribe to such a web service, give my preferences and filters in financial, social and environmental terms. This service would give me a snapshot of how the selected corporations compare one to each other regarding my preferences and filters. Moreover, I would receive as an RSS feed an alert whenever a new report is published or when some thresholds in performance are reached by the corporations I monitor.

Some technological issues still stand in the way of such future. They are fading away. But a huge amount of methodological and political issues stand there also… What if such technologies come to maturity ? Would they push corporations, rating agencies, analysts and stakeholders to change their minds and go in the right direction ?