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10-Q/K TweetingAugust 30th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As Google joins Bing and others in upping the capability of its real-time searching – to provide better insight into trending stories on Facebook, Twitter etc. – I wonder whether now is the time for the S.E.C. to add a Twitter feed to its existing RSS feed. Or maybe there is one and I just missed it? Read the rest of this entry » An XBRL talk worthy of SXSW – Power to the People: Regulating Big BusinessAugust 25th, 2010 by Barclay Friesen - COO
Many people are aware of the existence of XBRL, and some may even know that the SEC and other regulatory agencies have mandated its use. But how well is the general public informed on the boundless power and widespread applications of XBRL for financial reporting (and beyond)? We are pitching a panel topic focused on the role XBRL plays in corporate and government transparency for the next South by Southwest conference in Austin. Vote for it here: http://bit.ly/aT3E5T. This conference has a focus on innovation and technology – what better group to start sharing the XBRL message? Another Brick in the (XBRL) Wall?August 19th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Far be it for me to mock efforts to generate XBRL innovation but even I was surprised by the breathless intensity of the Brix Project – a new iPhone app for delivering ‘aha’ moments from XBRL filing data by literally delivering it into your hands. I can see it now. A killer chat up line. Here’s the script: Read the rest of this entry » RaaS or a teaspoon of SUGAR….August 19th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Watching ‘Mary Poppins’ and the delectable Julie Andrews administering that spoonful of sugar somehow reminded me of the S.E.C. and of one of the future directions in corporate reporting – namely RaaS or Reporting as a Service. And before you switch off, I don’t mean delivering reporting functionality as an online SaaS application – we already do that. I mean RaaS. Read the rest of this entry » Why are we doing so well?August 16th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
We’ve been taking a look at the latest data from the XBRL Cloud that summarizes various stats on XBRL filings made to the S.E.C. during 2009 and 2010 (to date). And whatever way you look at it, Rivet is doing well in terms of providing XBRL 10-Q and 10-K filing services. But the real question is why? If You Support Transparency – Support the BillAugust 12th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
H.R. 6038 or The Financial Transparency Act of 2010 was proposed by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) on July 30th. It’s a bill that deserves the support of anyone who believes that greater transparency of financial information is one way of helping to prevent the financial failures of the past and maybe even surface the financial opportunities of the future.
‘Crowd-sourced oversight’ certainly has the potential to be a powerful force for ‘averting and mitigating future financial crises’. And to enable this, the bill rightly emphasizes the importance and need for the use of ‘data standards’ by a number of Government agencies, by which is meant:
Now who can quibble with that? Stop being blindsided by information opacity and support the bill. And anyway, Rep. Issa is one of the few officials around who has a POGO award. Document vs. Data-Centric DesignAugust 11th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Documents are so flexible aren’t they? You can mix text and numbers, tables and charts – all within the same page context. You can even spend lots of time making a page look aesthetically pleasing and make the information enticing. To an individual human reader, a single well-designed page can communicate a lot of information very effectively. But what if you want to communicate data to many different information consumers with different interests in the data? What if your focus is not a single human ‘page reader’ but the rapidly expanding universe of online web services that ‘consume’ data programmatically to make it easier for any human information consumer to crowdsource and crowdshare and compare and contrast the data? That’s when document-centric information design falls down in comparison to data-centric design. To illustrate why, I’ll examine the Global Reporting Initiative’s NGO Sector Supplement Economic Indicator NG08 as an example. Read the rest of this entry » WYASIWYE or the 3 Levels of Information AssuranceAugust 4th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like WYSIWYG but Why-yah-zee-way is just as important a concept in relation to the three levels of information assurance. Read the rest of this entry » Here We Go Again…August 4th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
SmartPlanet did an article on SAP’s sustainability-related acquisitions back in April and in it, AMR Research analyst Steven Stokes was quoted as saying:
It appears that with sustainability reporting, as with virtually all other kinds of corporate reporting, we are once again in danger of a new kind of spreadsheet hell. What’s needed is a data standard for sustainability, which is why it is surprising that the newly convened IIRC does not seem to have XBRL on its radar. Surely this time around we have a chance to do it differently? The way of doing things in the past was develop a content/concept standard first then, almost as an afterthought, develop a data standard to support it. This is a redundant, pre-Internet way of thinking. It’s an approach that fails to recognize that dissemination of data is what democratizes information. Today content standards should be developed in tandem with data standards so that as soon as a concept is defined you can also implement it in an agreed way at the data storage level. It’s simple really. Developing a content standard without a data standard is like developing a corporate strategy without the tactics to execute it. The strategy looks great on paper but on the ground it’s just words not action. Strategy is executed via tactics; content standards are executed via data standards. Developing content and data standards together as a ‘joined-up’ effort ensures that any kind of standard hits the start line running by being more powerful and useful from the get-go and that it can be adopted, disseminated and leveraged at Internet speed not at a snails pace. After all who wants to wait until 2020 for a global reporting standard? XBRL: Beware The Terminator?August 3rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In the article Financial reporting: rise of the machines (targeted at fund managers and written by a software company guy but worth a look nevertheless), the point is made that:
Although the article bizarrely fails to mention XBRL, this is smack-bang in the middle of the value proposition of using a data standard like XBRL: streamlining and automating data management and report generation or tag-once, render-many as we acolytes of Mike Rohan’s tag-central vision like to say. Although the dream team of spreadsheet rendering plus XBRL data repository has not yet been fully realized, its time will surely come – unless of course something comes back from the future to try to stop it happening. So if you pick up the phone and hear a robotic voice asking for ‘Charlie Hoffman’ put the phone down and go on vacation to Greenland. |
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