SmartPlanet did an article on SAP’s sustainability-related acquisitions back in April and in it, AMR Research analyst Steven Stokes was quoted as saying:

But what’s most frightening, Stokes said, is that many companies’ solution for sustainability is powered by a rather unsophisticated tool: Microsoft Excel.

“Just 7 percent of Fortune 1000 companies say they’re reporting [carbon footprint data] and find it easy to do so,” Stokes said.

It appears that with sustainability reporting, as with virtually all other kinds of corporate reporting, we are once again in danger of a new kind of spreadsheet hell. What’s needed is a data standard for sustainability, which is why it is surprising that the newly convened IIRC does not seem to have XBRL on its radar.

Surely this time around we have a chance to do it differently?

The way of doing things in the past was develop a content/concept standard first then, almost as an afterthought, develop a data standard to support it. This is a redundant, pre-Internet way of thinking. It’s an approach that fails to recognize that dissemination of data is what democratizes information. Today content standards should be developed in tandem with data standards so that as soon as a concept is defined you can also implement it in an agreed way at the data storage level.

It’s simple really. Developing a content standard without a data standard is like developing a corporate strategy without the tactics to execute it. The strategy looks great on paper but on the ground it’s just words not action. Strategy is executed via tactics; content standards are executed via data standards.

Developing content and data standards together as a ‘joined-up’ effort ensures that any kind of standard hits the start line running by being more powerful and useful from the get-go and that it can be adopted, disseminated and leveraged at Internet speed not at a snails pace. After all who wants to wait until 2020 for a global reporting standard?