XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting - Blog: Digital Financial Reporting (using XBRL)

XBRL-based digital financial reporting will, in my personal opinion, have a cross over affect on general business reporting and in particular business intelligence software.

The video, Digital Business Reporting, summarizes this information. Business intelligence software is explained to be the following per this web site:

Business intelligence software is a set of tools used by companies to retrieve, analyze, and transform data into useful business insights. Examples of business intelligence tools include data visualization, data warehousing, dashboards, and reporting. In contrast to competitive intelligence, business intelligence software pulls from internal data that the business produces, rather than from outside sources.

Here is an overview of the top BI tools. One thing BI tools have in common is the data warehouse and OLAP. Here are some issues with OLAP that I have pointed out in the past. Here is a summary of those issues; watch the video and I explain the enhancements provided by XBRL+ SBRM:

There is no global standard for OLAP
Cube rigidity
Limited computation support, mainly roll ups
Limited business rule support and inability to exchange business rules between implementations
Inability to transfer cubes between different systems, each system is a "silo" which cannot communicate with other proprietary silos
Inability to articulate metadata which can be shared between OLAP systems
Focus on numeric-type information and inconsistent support for text data types
OLAP systems tend to be internally focused within an organization and do not work well externally, for example across a supply chain
OLAP tends to be read only

My deliberate, rigorous, methodical testing of XBRL and SBRM for financial reporting leads me to believe that the ideas I am using for XBRL-based financial reporting will work well for digital business reporting. Not quite as good as for financial reporting because of the higher level models of financial reporting; but it will still work well.

What is becoming crystal clear is the following. XBRL+SBRM is a knowledge media that:

Enables standards setter, regulator, or enterprise to describe and specify information about some reporting scheme in machine readable form
Enables information bearer to produce information consistent with that provided specification that is machine readable.
Enables information receiver or consumer to effectively consume information leveraging that provided specification using automated machine-based processes.

The rules provided by XBRL + SBRM (i.e. that specification) are the “orchestra leader” that enables the harmony (i.e. mitigates disharmony) and prevents anarchy (i.e. enabling effective information exchange).

Testing proves this.