CIO Today: XBRL use beyond compliance

[SRIDHAR KRISHNAN]

http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=101009Z89TGR&page=3

Quoting from the article in CIO Today:

Initially, the use of XBRL will be limited to financial statements, 10Ks, etc. However,
this is only the tip of the iceberg for XBRL and its capabilities. As software
companies add the tagging functionality for XBRL to their applications, the data
will be available at various stages in the reporting chain. More and more uses
of this data will be found because the whole idea of XBRL is to make the data
more readily available for import into users' analytical systems. It will be
found to be the cheapest and easiest way to obtain and analyze data, which will
mean that it will be used more and that the reuse of the data by various types
of users will make it a lot more cost effective for the providers of the
information than current systems, which in fact are often cumbersome.
That means in future we will see investors and other stakeholders using laptops and
hand-helds to download particular data items into their own interfaces for their
own consumption on a near real time basis. This will complete the cycle for the
pending round of changes. Financial and business reporting will continue on its
path of going into a real time mode, making available all kinds of data on
demand for a variety of sophisticated and nonsophisticated stakeholders using
everything to access the data from their home entertainment units to their car
stereos to their smartphones. Such is the immediate future of corporate
reporting on the Internet.
Web use has expedited the broadening of information that companies report. Now
corporate reporting encompasses topics such as sustainability and governance
reporting.