Data in the Next Decade

There is a time for predictions or at least thinking more deeply about the future and often that time is at the beginning of a new year and especially a new decade. Technology News has come up with some predictions about the "tens" which contain the following:

"As we move through our lives, we'll leave more and more digital detritus. Some of it will resemble what we share online today. Some will be emitted quietly by devices, just as mobile phones can signal their location.
We'll also have access to more data about the world around us, dwarfing the real-time stock quotes, government statistics, scientific databases and other information stores available today.

In the next decade as conjured by Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, all that information will be available instantaneously, anywhere. He imagines spotting an acquaintance at a conference and having at his fingertips links to the person's most recent research, plus a reminder of her husband's name."

This is dead on in terms of existing trends and the logical course of events as we move forward into the next decade. Companies are moving to cloud computing. Computing capacity will grow exponentially because of this fact. The capacity for handling data, raw and otherwise, will also grow tremendously. New technologies for adding context to that data, such as XBRL, will come into their own. People will rely on selecting relevant data and running analytics against it rather than poring over prepared reports. The behavioural implications of this trend are most intriguing.

Analysts, investors and others will become accustomed to drawing upon the data they find most relevant to their decision making needs. Over time, they will develop customized analyses and simply refresh those analyses with fresh data when they need to review their decisions.

Over the next decade, the growth in the power of information systems will be remarkable, but the behavioural changes prompted by that growth will be even more so. Check out the predictions by Technology Newsworld.

IASC Foundation publishes 2010 architecture for the IFRS and IFRS for SMEs Taxonomies

On December 9, 2009, the IASC Foundation issued a release to announce that "the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation  published The IFRS Taxonomy 2010 Architecture Draft for public comment.  It also published a project summary and feedback statement on Architectural improvements to the IFRS Taxonomy.  The feedback statement summarises the architectural improvements that will be implemented in the next release of the IFRS Taxonomy in 2010 as a result of consultations in July 2009. 

"The IFRS Taxonomy 2010 Architecture Draft documents in detail the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) architecture of the IFRS Taxonomy 2010, including the IFRS for Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs) Taxonomy.  It explains the design rationale of the IFRS Taxonomy architecture, how the architecture satisfies the requirements of the Taxonomy, and the use of axes (dimensions), taxonomy modularisation, taxonomy framework, extensions framework and instantiation in the Taxonomy.  It also addresses new XBRL technologies such as formulae, rendering and versioning, and the technical aspects of the IFRS Taxonomy relevant to software vendors."

A Dream for XBRL
by Gerald Trites

The CICA had its annual Corporate Reporting Awards in Toronto yesterday. The Awards program has been running for almost 60 years and its an understatement to say that there has been a lot of change over those years. In 2001, the Awards program was expanded to include Electronic Disclosure - basically how companies use their websites to disclose IR information.

A consistent theme of the judges reporting on electronic disclosure has been that companies often make it difficult for users to obtain the information they want, usually by burying it within huge pdf files, that take a long time to download and search.

This year, the judges cited a CICA research study expected to be released in the spring which takes a somewhat different approach to web disclosures. As the ED judging coordinator, I said the study will be taking the approach that the website should be viewed as a data mart. The data within the site is packaged largely according to packages that have evolved over a long period of time within the paper paradigm, such as financial statements, MD&A's and annual reports. We need to think of the availability of the data and question whether the traditional packages really do the job. We need to think of how that data can be repackaged to make it more useful to investors and other users. The website needs to be viewed holistically and the data availability made consistent across the site.

So here's the dream. That the data mart be totally organized and packaged by using XBRL. That  a single taxonomy be created for the presentation of website data marts that sweep in all the data that would be included on the IR section of a website. To be manageable, the architecture of such a taxonomy would likely have to incorporate, perhaps, by reference the existing financial statement taxonomies. This could be handled without great difficulty.

An XBRL reader would be included in the website so that the users would not have to look at XML style instance documents and this reader would be used to assemble the data the users want.

The advantages of this Website taxonomy would be impressive. It would enable instant access to all the details in the IR Section of a website, even within the notes to the financial statements. The information could be compared internally and with other companies.

Most importantly, the users would not have to dig through annual reports and big PDF documents to find the information they want. Why don't we do that?