Intelligent Business

The importance of XBRL in B2BI

After XBRL was already marked as a major trend during the Gartner BI Summit in Februari 2008, - provided it would become an obligation -, NuZakelijk.nl reported last month that the Securities & Exchange Commission wants to oblige this reporting standard in the U.S. to all publicly traded companies.

Very many large organizations will be influenced by this government obligation in the way they carry out their (financial) reporting. All of a sudden XBRL will get the critical mass to become the de facto standard.

Potentially, this decision has far-reaching implications for BI. In particular, the simple exchange of information is, in my opinion the most important next step in the maturity of BI, namely interorganizational BI or Business to Business Intelligence (B2BI). Besides organizational conditions like trust and type of relationship, the XBRL standard can provide organizations with the most important technical condition for B2BI. Namely, it would finally be efficient and easy to exchange reports between different organizations (or business units). Like for example, EDI that caused the widespread exchange of data between companies, I foresee that XBRL will play this role for B2BI. In a way organizations can finally exchange information after data in an easy (=broadly accepted) way.

What do you think? Will B2BI take off with XBRL? Or will it be driven by another standard?

More information on XBRL (in Dutch).

Add comment July 11th, 2008