I’m sitting here in the audience at the 16th XBRL International Conference waiting to give my address to an audience of business leaders from around the world. Christopher Cox the Chairman of the United States Securities & Exchange Commission is speaking now. He just talked about Wikinomics and how important our work on collaboration is to the changes underway in financial reporting. He called XBRL the Napster of investing. There are many commissioners, government ministers and other regulatory, bank governors and business leaders in the office.
There is a lot of buzz in the room because XBRL is about to take off. There are big changes in the wind with regard to reporting, transparency and collaboration.
XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data and a critical element of the Web 2.0. It stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is one of a family of XML languages which are standardizing information handling, applications and communications on the web. Basically every entry in a report becomes an XML tag. XBRL is taking off for financial reporting — for example in Japan XBRL documents will be required for all reporting in April of next year and this is already the case in Korea. Among other benefits, anyone can examine Korean financial reports in the language of their choosing. Next week in the United States the XBRL consortium will release a taxonomy enabling any US company to transform its reporting to an XBRL format. XBRL is going mainstream. There is even and XBRL for Dummies book.
In the past, proponents of XBRL emphasized how it can reduce costs, and improve efficiency, accuracy and reliability in financial reporting. True the financial document is becoming digitized, networked and enriched with services, but much more is underway. It is becoming a truly interactive application rather than a static document, and as such becomes a tool for collaboration.
My talk is Wikinomics: mass collaboration, transparency and XBRL.
XBRL is not simply a language for reporting financial information. It is at the heart of a profound change in the nature and modus operandi of corporations and financial markets. As data and information become digital it becomes interactive and networked, providing a new platform for communication and collaboration.
Furthermore XBRL can only be achieved through mass collaboration itself. It needs to be better defined and developed. There is a need for new taxonomies, applications and capabilities. What better way to do this, than apply the principles of Wikinomics? XBRL needs to be wiki’d!
I can’t help but thinking the world needs a new syndicated program entitled “Wikinomics: reporting, transparency and mass collaboration”.
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Seems that the semantic web idea is really starting to become a reality.
Comment by Eoin Whelan - December 4, 2007 7:40 am
good luck! is there a video or other of your presentation available?
Comment by Derek Abdinor - December 4, 2007 9:55 am
[...] Don Tapscott discusses the links between XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and collaboration during his talk named Wikinomics: mass collaboration, transparency and XBRL at the 16th XBRL [...]
Pingback by Collab@work » Blog Archive » Interoperability, Collaboration and Wikinomics - December 6, 2007 3:11 pm
“XBRL is not simply a language for reporting financial information. It is at the heart of a profound change in the nature and modus operandi of corporations and financial markets. As data and information become digital it becomes interactive and networked, providing a new platform for communication and collaboration.”
This is also true for other vertical standards such as HR-XML.
The HR-XML specifications were mostly triggered by software providers and big corporate HR IT departments aiming at reducing their costs of integrating proprietary systems. They realized that there was a better way and created this Consortium. Their goal: create a standard language for HR transactions so to (1) lower the costs of integrating with new partners, (2) speed-up the development of such integrations and (3) lower the error rate of what is lost in translation.
As the data is now flowing between these recruiting, on-boarding, competency management, HRIS (Human Resource Information Systems), payroll, benefits, and background check systems, we are realizing that there is unexpected value that is created in the process. (Note: there are actually many more systems, but that would make too long a list)
Before those systems start to be interoperable, data that was passed from one system to another was limited to the strict minimum. Systems (and departments) were behaving as silos. Thus you had a recruiting system that knew a lot about candidates (you can’t imagine the amount of data that is collected during the recruiting process), and a central HR system that knew very little about its employees. Everything you told about your skills, your motivation, your achievements were lost from a corporate perspective!
Now when you arrive in your new position, your HR department knows about you, and that allows managers and HR teams to do a better job at following your career and your assignments. Of course, interoperability does not it all. There are plenty of HR departments who decide not to use these new capabilities. But the point remains: they have a new tool for collaborating with the recruiters, and later on with the managers that is available to them.
The second source of value is that this data can be enriched. For each transaction, I now know who initiated it, what day, what time, what system did it come from, …. and I can use this data to better collaborate with my partners.
For instance, knowing that my best software developers candidates came through Techcrunch blog but not the software architect allows me to collaborate better with Techcrunch. By providing this feedback, they have a better understanding of their readership and thus can decide whether they should stop articles targeting architects or rather developing better content for these architects.
Again, interoperability does not automatically generate collaboration: nothing forces the company to provide this feedback, but without interoperability there is no feedback to provide.
Comment by Romuald - December 6, 2007 3:13 pm
[...] titled Wikinomics: Mass Collaboration, Transparency and XBRL. I don’t see it online as yet, but a post on his blog gives good insight into the content. The speech was sufficiently inspirational to motivate Charlie [...]
Pingback by Hitachi XBRL » Blog Archive » A Roundup of Recent XBRL Developments - December 19, 2007 6:29 pm