Reading Gary Thompson’s very interesting post from last year (?) on Cloud Dimensions: Who, What, When & Where got me thinking about XBRL GL again in terms of my upcoming ‘Dare to Share’ presentation in Brussels. Perhaps the inventors of XBRL GL were not ambitious enough in their thinking of the role that something like XBRL Global Ledger could play. Especially if it were just re-positioned slightly and renamed (to avoid that general ledger connotation) to something like XBRL CL (Corporate Lens).
If you mashup transparency, with sharing, with points of view (POVs) and XBRL GL, it starts to make you think that maybe something like XBRL CL could have an important role to play going forward.
xbrl-cl
Many people have proposed that we should not be sending files to regulators but that regulators should simply retrieve it, web service-wise from our corporate servers. Our friends at RRD are not going to like this suggestion much but really, sending all these files to all these places is a pain. In much the same way, in the spirit of ‘intentional transparency’, other stakeholders could also access corporate data the same way as a regulator but simply via a different lens.
Of course there are many issues with this kind of open data access: authentication, permission to access the data, ability to drilldown, what the data can be used for etc. But technically nothing essentially different from what every Facebook, Twitter or Flickr like application programming interface (API) deals with already. Regulators, auditors, business partners and other stakeholders could potentially benefit from a ‘standard reporting’ data lens like this that provides a point of entry in a well-defined, taxonomized way.
Naturally, you accessing ‘your’ data on Facebook via an API is different from an ‘outsider’ accessing your data – you are in reality the owner of your data on Facebook. But in effect Facebook functions as little more than a front-end to your data and makes it visible in various ways to various ‘permissioned’ stakeholder groups (at least it does now on the back of various privacy concerns). XBRL CL simply bolts on a web service layer and provides a set of POV ‘lenses’ through which externals can access your internal data.
XBRL GL as it stands today was not designed for this purpose but there’s no reason why it – or something like it – couldn’t be adapted to this kind of use. Clearly there is a ‘Dare to Share’ aspect to this proposition but as people like David McCandless and others like him are proving, when you get the data out there you discover interesting things. As McCandless puts it: Data is the new soil.
Tags: XBRL GL
