It’s alway good to see another article extolling the virtues of XBRL – like Brad Monterio’s 10 XBRL Myths Exploded – but it’s also important to keep a sense of perspective. XBRL does have considerable promise for many of the benefits that Brad mentions but it’s taken a long while to get to this point and it’s far from certain that XBRL will fulfil its destiny without more help along the way. What Brad fails to mention is that without the S.E.C. mandate (in the US specifically) XBRL could just be another dried up creek in the ever-expanding delta of information technology. An evolutionary dead end like the 3 legged Aardvark. A wandering minstrel in the land of the deaf. In fact he never mentioned any of those.
Back in 1999 I used to write breathless articles about the promise of XBRL (called XFRML in those days). The diagram below is from my 1999 book Financial Analytics (so popular you can’t even find it on Amazon’s long tail). Much of what I talked about in the text around this diagram like ‘report mining’ and XBRL ‘revolutionizing’ internal consolidations still hasn’t happened, despite the efforts of many worthy people (and the odd nutcase).
xbrl-1999
Other than some new mandate e.g. for sustainability reporting, for me the next bombshell event for XBRL is ERP integration, which, when it is pervasive, will change the whole landscape because then XBRL will be embedded in virtually every major organization, globally. Whether you like it or not and whether anyone mandates it or not.
Then XBRL will also become the EDI of ERP and we may finally see the end of ASCII/CSV import and export files and a new level of interoperability between ERP systems.
