The 2011 Gartner/Financial Executives International (FEI) study is out, based on 344 ‘highly qualified’ respondents of which 75% were CFOs. As with all these surveys, the results contain some dilemmas.
42% of respondents cited Creating an effective environment for sharing relevant information and 43% cited Quality of the data used for business information as technology constraints. Yet according to the Gartner survey owner, John Van Decker in the Financial Times
CFOS do not see XBRL benefits…Just 5% plan to use it for internal reporting
Despite all the hype, evangelism and mandates, much of the key rationale for XBRL is still not clear to the people who are likely to benefit most from it. It’s strange that CFOs will spend millions on ERP with one key value proposition – integration – yet can’t be persuaded that XBRL is a great opportunity for creating an effective environment for sharing relevant information and improving the quality of data.
As I’ve said many times over the last decade, it looks like XBRL will only be adopted inside enterprises (as opposed to for external regulatory reporting) by stealth. By which I mean when it is integrated into ERP systems and is just there, doing its job under the covers, like other technologies that achieved the same goal such as Structured Query Language (SQL). Take SQL away and most ERP systems would not work, because they depend on databases that depend on this language to interact with application code. Do most CFOs know or care much about SQL? No. And why should they?
Back in the early 90′s when relational database management systems (RDBMS) were just starting to be used by the then newly minted ‘ERP’ systems, I and many others went around extolling the wondrous benefits of ‘SQL’ and ‘RDBMSs’ to bemused CFOs and Controllers. But now every ERP system is using a RDBMS it’s not even a tick box on an ERP selection RFP. The RDBMS is an invisible part of the technology stack of every ERP system.
We need to get to the stage where talking to CFOs about ‘tags’ and ‘taxonomies’ makes as much sense as talking to them about SQL. And that can only happen when the technology is embedded and invisible and when setting up a data tag is as natural as setting up an account in an ERP system and navigating a taxonomy as natural as navigating a chart of accounts.
