Global Brains or Dare to Share (9)

May 16th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I enjoyed skimming Tim O’Reilly’s presentation from TED 2011 Towards a Global Brain. It has some good dare to share quotes in it like this one from Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist at Google:

We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.

As XBRL is just one of many bricks in the wall of data sharing, this is encouraging.

One of the concepts O’Reilly also refers to is ‘selection by association’, which is something that has an XBRL connection in relation to the kind of compliance analytics Rivet supports e.g. the decision to extend or not extend a tag or to select or not select the same tag for a fact as your peer group. Associating your tag selection choices with those of your peer group could help to avoid ‘red flags’ when your S.E.C. filings are reviewed by regulator or investor analysis tools.


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Should Have Gone to Specsavers

May 16th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Microsoft has launched a new add-in for Excel called Fuzzy Lookup that is supposed to help you with the problem of identifying and matching textually similar string data in Excel (e.g. when importing data). Oddly enough this relates to the ‘data scrubber’ point I made in my last post, although Microsoft rather primly refer to the process as ‘data cleaning‘.

I thought it was amusing that the first bug fix relates to incoming decimal points:

An updated version of the add-in has just been released. It fixes a bug that was causing the tool to fail on systems where the default numeric format for decimal values is configured to use something other than “.” as the decimal separator.

Those pesky foreigners using ‘,’  when we all know a decimal point is ‘.’  goddammit.

You can clarify the fuzziness of this post by going to the Contextures blog where you will find lots more helpful information about using the fuzzy add-in. Specs optional.


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Big Data or Dare to Share (8)

May 14th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

A new McKinsey report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity is worth a skim. McKinsey thinks we are at a tipping point with big data and that there are many ways of leveraging the availability of big data to create value, for example:

Creating transparency – Simply making big data more easily accessible to relevant stakeholders in a timely manner can create tremendous value.

As this is a big report I thought I’d start analyzing it by creating a wordcloud from the text. The results were not that enlightening. Read the rest of this entry »


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Dare to Share (7)

May 9th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

As I look for examples of Dare to Share in action, I’m coming across various sites that you may or may not have heard of that are espousing the principles of ‘open accountability’ – so here’s a quick summary… Read the rest of this entry »


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XBRL CL or Dare to Share (5)

May 6th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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). Read the rest of this entry »


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How to Payoff the National Debt

May 3rd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Thanks to Anne Leslie-Binni’s Colorful Gadget Highlights XBRL’s Potential I think I have figured out a way to payoff the national debt. This new visualization of XBRL data from XBRL US shows that there was some $25 trillion (or is $25,736,711,207,100 a gazillion? – numbers never were my strong point) in corporate assets in 2008. So all President Obama has to do is mandate the retirement of all corporate assets as a one off ‘God Save America’ tax windfall and he’s done. What’s more this would trigger an unprecedented surge in demand to replace those assets providing a valuable economic stimulus not just for the USA but for the world (or as it’s now known, China).

xbrl-us viz

In the unlikely event that my suggestion is acted upon, my hot tip would be to invest in Dyson shares. Once all those assets are gone there’s going to be a lot of dust lying around offices and factory floors that needs cleaning up. So I expect a run on cylindrical suction devices. Even those like Mr Dyson’s that have a beach ball attached to the front.

I never bothered to get an MBA. Perhaps you can see why. And I’m sure this new XBRL data visualization can bring more value to the table than my humble country-saving suggestion.  If only I was smart enough to figure out what. Ted – got any ideas?


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Triplification or Dare to Share (4)

April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

In Dare to Share 3 I referred to the paper by Garcia and Gil about linking XBRL data to the semantic web. Roberto Garcia has another paper covering very similar ground called Triplificating and Linking XBRL Financial Data. Here I just want to comment on some stats from their efforts.

However,  just in case anyone is mystified… Triplification does not refer to triple filtered Irish whisky or triple filtered Stella Artois, the Belgian lager with the famously smooth outcome, but converting data into triples, one of the pillars of the semantic web. Personally I find a few lagers and whisky chasers quite useful when trying to get to the grips with anything to do with the semantic web, but then I’m no Roberto Garcia (didn’t someone make a movie called Bring me the head of Roberto Garcia?). Anyway I digress as I sit here among the remains of a Stella six pack and a half-empty bottle of Jameson. Read the rest of this entry »


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Integrated Reporting: Update

April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I thought it was about time to catch up on what’s happening with Integrated Reporting (IR) so it was good to see the initiative now has its own website and roadmap. The Federation of European Accountants has already published a factsheet on IR and the ACCA’s Accountancy Futures provides a useful overview of IR – I particularly liked the fact that the word ‘holistic’ is creeping in and the perspective of the ACCA’s Rachel Jackson. But if you want a good place to start catching up on IR, other than the website, try this free PDF download from HBS: The Landscape of Integrated Reporting.


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Dare to Share (3)

April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

In this third Dare to Share post I want to share some more insight I gained from the online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood – specifically from the chapter Linking XBRL Financial Data by Garcia and Gil who usefully propose that:

Consequently, our opinion is that the best short term approach in order to get financial and business data to the Semantic Web is not to propose and alternative language based on Semantic Web technologies, but to apply methods to map existing XBRL to semantic metadata. This also seems the best option in the short and midterm to populate the Web of Data with business information.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Dare to Share (2)

April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I wasn’t very familiar with the Linked Data Initiative (LDI) until I came across this online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood. As Bernadette Hyland says on p.57 :

The basic assumption of Linked Data is that the usefulness and value of data increases the more readily it can be accessed and recombined with other data

Read the rest of this entry »


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