Data Integration is Still an Issue

Data is a major force in the new economy. Data is key to strategy formulation and is a competitive necessity.  The advent of mobile technologies in particular makes possible the accumulation of vast amounts of data that can be potentially used for business strategic purposes. BI systems and Data Analytics are often touted as vehicles for using this information.

There is, however a major problem. Businesses are finding it difficult to integrate the data from external sources with their internal data. (See, for example, this article) The main problem is that the external data comes in different formats from the internal data and there is a need for tools that can conform these data types through standardization.

Standardization of data can be achieved with such markup languages as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which involve adding tags (metadata) to the data that explain its nature. The tags move with the data and therefore perpetuate its understandability to different audiences. They also enable the data to be read by other computer systems without human intervention, thus making the use of the data financially viable.

Such standardized data for financial purposes, and in some cases non-financial data, is already available in much of the world and is being used to analyze and compare financial data from diverse sources. It's called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), a derivative of XML that it specifically designed to standardize the tags so as to represent financial data in a way that it can be easily understood by diverse systems and users.

XBRL is a requirement in much of the developed world, except for Canada. Why it is not required in Canada is a bit of a mystery, other than to observe that the securities regulators and the government have not taken a leadership role as they have in other countries.

Data is much too important in the modern economy to be ignored. On that there is a consensus. Standardized data is a proven and viable way to enable data to be used in an efficient and useful manner. The movement to standardize data around the world is commendable in this regard and hopefully this will eventually spread to Canada.