Digital Financial Reporting

Many movie theaters are going out of business because they cannot make the switch to digital projection equipment. The Borders bookstore that I used to like to go to is now an empty, vacant building.  A couple of years ago I sent thousands of dollars worth (when new) of photography equipment to Goodwill because it was obsolete. My Denon stereo system was scrapped years ago, as were my collection of cassette tapes.  I am still wondering what to do with all my CDs which now live on my iMac within iTunes so I can get them on my iPod.

The switch away from the historical paradigm of financial reporting to the new paradigm of digital financial reporting will occur sooner and faster than you might believe.  Are you prepared?

While XBRL might be a career niche today, it may turn into a constraint if you don't have the skills you need to survive in a world of digital financial reporting.

How do you get those skills?  I summarized this in a blog post a while back.

The real question is not how to get there you need to be, it is whether to make the investment to get there.  IBM seems to be making the shift. Others are also. 

The dynamics of the innovation process can be hard to understand and even harder to predict.  Then deciding whether to make the leap one needs to consider risk.  The global consultancy firm Gartner classifies XBRL as a transformational technology.  Gartner defines transformational as something that "enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics."  Major shifts means lots of change and some winners and some losers.

Don't be road kill in the switch to digital financial reporting.