There’s a word in Danish – hvadfornoget – which roughly means ‘What’s that all about?’. Then there’s a word I often use that my Biology master (in 1968) – a veteran of the World War One trenches no less – used to say whenever there was some kind of disturbance in the classroom: Whatthewhobeganit!
Which brings me to a point raised by Mike Willis who proposes that instead of asking ‘who is using XBRL’ we should be asking ‘what is using XBRL’. Whathewhobeganit?
As Mike rightly points out, the purpose of XBRL is to make financial data machine readable. Humans don’t consume XBRL instance documents – unless they are really, really hungry – programs do. So the real acid test of the success or not of XBRL is not ‘who is using it’ but ‘what is using it’. Because if more ‘whats’ use it, the ‘whos’ will inevitably follow.
The guys that dream up the XBRL taxonomies and their abstraction layers and what not need to hire a few people who think like machines so they can make XBRL more attractive to ‘whats’ as well as ‘whos’. Perhaps the former Governor of California could help? Maybe he could recoup some of that $200 mill he claims it cost him to run the sunshine state.
It’s kind of like the database language SQL. It wasn’t invented for people. It was invented for machines (and Joe Celko) so they could figure out how data was related and aggregate it and stuff (that’s about as far as I want to go with explaining SQL despite scary Joe Celko’s books being some of my favourite bedtime reading).
Turns out the whats quite liked SQL. With the result that most of us whos have ended up using SQL day-in and day-out whenever we use a business application or a dynamic website that leverages a back-end database. Most of us don’t know we’re doing it but we are.
Which is also where XBRL wants to get to. A situation where lots of whats are using it but few whos even know it exists.
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