Cookies, Context and the Reality Based Community

April 29th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Tony Zuck offers an interesting post that compares XBRL to cookie labels and also makes the case for the vision and performance of a company being about more than just the numbers. However there are some other perspectives on this take that call Tony’s logic into question. One being that he could have used our CrossView as the reference point for his post but never mind… Read the rest of this entry »


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XBRL for Silos

April 16th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Where I live, in the UK’s West Country, a silo is somewhere you keep manure. Something smelly that you want to keep isolated from the rest of the farm. It’s not much different in IT data-management. A silo is an isolated datastore and much of the effort of corporate IT departments is focused on getting silos to talk to each other. So it’s useful to remember that XBRL is also an important mechanism for driving the data interchange used for integrating silos. Read the rest of this entry »


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Sponsor a PhD

April 14th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

The University of Birmingham (UK not Alabama) is offering a self-funded PhD with the research theme: A critical assessment of the the impact of XBRL on corporate reporting. This could be your chance to sponsor your own XBRL PhD assuming you don’t feel that the lack of official funding somehow equates with a lack of interest in the results. Personally, I don’t have that much faith in XBRL-related PhD research given that this work XBRL Citation Analysis: A decade of Progress and Puzzle, omits some of the earliest published references to XBRL (or XFRML as it was then) including this landmark work written in 1999 in a converted pigsty and now available on Bonanzle for just $3.


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Sock One and Sock Too

April 13th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

The concept of XML/XBRL tagging has been explained to newcomers in many ways – barcodes for financial data has always been popular – but I must have missed this enlightening description involving items of Liz Hurley’s clothing, offered on the UK ICAEW IT Counts blog by Simon Hurst way back in 2008… Read the rest of this entry »


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The XBRL Eventstream

April 6th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Danny Werfel, the Comptroller for the Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) makes a good point when he states:

“The way I approach it, and have collective agreement among the key leaders among leaders at Treasury, OMB, and other critical parties that are thinking about this, is that XBRL is the second question to ask.” (see Federal News Radio)

This isn’t what Werfel was alluding to above, but I agree that XBRL has become the second question to ask and for me the first question, especially for XBRL software vendors like us, has become: Now it’s gaining momentum, how are we going to leverage it? Read the rest of this entry »


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Well Can It?

April 1st, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I had a chuckle when I read a recent Business Finance magazine blog post Can XBRL finally automate finance by Alan Radding. Partly because this was not framed as a question (no ?), which was odd, but mostly because it reminded me of my own article for Business Finance back in November 1999 called XML means Business that included an example ‘XML-based’ financial statement generated from the FRx report writer. This must have confused the hell out of my accounting readers but was something that I thought was very cool at the time (sad isn’t it?). Over a decade later, I’m still convinced that XML means business and that XBRL can automate finance but it’s certainly turning out to be a longer haul than I expected.


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XBRL: The Views of Stakeholders

April 1st, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Back in December 2009 the the UK-based ACCA conducted some research into XBRL …

The purpose of this research was to conduct a questionnaire survey of accountants in UK listed companies (FTSE All Share), external auditors, tax practitioners and representatives of the investment management and analyst communities to investigate their views on how the development of second-generation digital reporting in general, and XBRL in particular, could affect the future of the business reporting and analysis process.

The resulting 65-page report XBRL: The Views of Stakeholders (admittedly based on only 153 responses) is nevertheless a substantial and useful addition to the XBRL body of knowledge, yet the key finding - The business case for organisations to adopt XBRL needs to be made more visible – will not be surprising to many in the XBRL world.


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