XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

One day, I was looking out of my office window and I saw this: The ship is the world's largest container ship.  The 4 minute video, How a Steel Box Changed the World: A Brief History of Shipping , explained how the inter-model shipping container , standards ISO 668:2013 and ISO 1496-1:2013, changed the world. This 10 minute video, How Container Ships Work , digs into the details the efficiencies realized from using shipping containers. Standards are a set of technical specifications that provide or intend to provide a common design for a product or process.  Standardization can be across organizations or even within an organization. The Harvard Business Review article, The Globalization of Markets , the author asserts that "well-managed companies have moved from emphasis on customizing items to offering globally standardized products that are advanced, functional, reliable-and low priced. Multinational companies that concentrated on idiosyncratic consumer preferences have beco...

Termboard seems to be a really useful software application. Here is Termboard in Github.  This set of generic terms is an example of what you can do with Termboard. Here are some video tutorials. Here is a quick start guide. Here is the Termboard manual . So apparently, you cannot actually publish a "Termboard" that you create.  You can generate an HTML page ( like this which I created ), PDF, PowerPoint.  You can also generate Excel, JSON-LD,  Turtle; however, not all the information is provided in the export so you cannot really share all the information from a model.  That said, there are a lot of really good ideas in Termboard. Here is a discussion on LinkedIn which walks through using Termboard with ChatGPT. Here are some examples: Semantic modeling taxonomy Generic terms User Story template Here is a little test set of terms I am fiddling with to understand how Termboard works. Additional Information: Accounting, the Language of Business CDB Knowled...

Accounting and audit is about to get a significant productivity boost.  How? The productivity boost will come from the capability to create a human-machine team using knowledge based systems  (a.k.a. what I call a mindful machine for accountancy ) effectively. Hybrid artificial intelligence, grounded in rules-based artificial intelligence and supplemented by probability-based artificial intelligence, and operated by a skilled, experienced accountant/auditor will make "the average accountant" above average. A super accountant/auditor.  Service as Software (SaS) will be a new way to deliver professional services.  Entire workflows will have significant reductions in the "friction" that exists today. Quality will skyrocket and attaining that level of quality will cost less.  That is the definition of productivity . It is tempting to think that achieving this productivity boost will be easy.  It will not. Attaining this productivity gain will be hard work. Per...

In this blog post I am going to do something that might seem a bit odd, but I think you might find this contrasting of pantone colors and financial reports helpful in understanding digital financial disclosures. Please read to the end; trust me, this will make sense. Pantone is somewhat of a universal standardized "color language" that ensures a specific color looks exactly the same, no matter who is producing that color or where in the world they are.   The Pantone Matching System (PMS), is a proprietary color naming system used in a variety of industries, such as graphic design, fashion design, product design, printing, and manufacturing.  By giving each color a name and a number and standardizing the colors, manufacturers can all refer to the Pantone system color name or number to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another. The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to "color match" specific colors when a design enters production stage, re...

In a private group email related to  the creation of the Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) , a colleague from the Object Management Group (OMG) mentioned the notion of "fail loudly" which is one of the most brilliant statements I have heard in years. And the notion of "fail loudly" is connected to other notions related to failure: Fail Loudly Masked Failure Prevent Failure Define Failure Control Failure Cost of Failure Avoiding Failure In the rest of this article I will elaborate on each of the above ideas as they relate to the work performed by professional accountants in the creation of financial reports or performing internal or third party financial audits. Fail loudly "Fail loudly" means that instead of allowing mistakes to accumulate and show up unexpectedly later in a process; software proactively monitors and detects invalid inputs, unexpected states, and violations of assumptions and expectations in real time. If something goes wrong, software...