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Standards for Interconnecting the Enterprise Stack

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I am trying to understand the relationship between the Universal Business Language (UBL, an ISO/IEC standard ) which defines the structure, content, and semantics of business documents which end up as business events ; the ISO/IEC standard Accounting and Economic Ontology  which includes REA for representing business events , Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards ( ACTUS , on path to become ISO/IEC standard) which is a global initiative to bring clarity, consistency, and precision to the way financial contracts (e.g. the business events of financial institutions but one side of those events related to enterprises served by those financial institutions ) are represented and analyzed; the FASB US GAAP Taxonomy and IFRS Accounting Taxonomy that enables aggregated information about business events to be reported to regulators, the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR, an OMG standard) which is an initiative and general tool or mechanism for representin...
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Universal Business Language

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The Universal Business Language (UBL) is an XML-based standard created and maintained by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for electronic business documents. Think of it as a universal vocabulary for invoices, credit notes, purchase orders, and other commercial documents. In addition, ISO/IEC 19845:2015  (which is free to download) specifies the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL version 2.1), which "defines a generic XML interchange format for business documents that can be restricted or extended to meet the requirements of particular industries".  Specifically, UBL provides the following three things: A suite of structured business objects and their associated semantics expressed as reusable data components and common business documents A library of XML schemas for reusable data components such as "Address", "Item", and "Payment", the common data elements of everyday business documents A set of X...
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Modern Version of Ricordanze

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The condition of today's accounting information systems is that of a chance product driven over the last fifty years by a continuous sequence of requirements to meet the immediate needs of an enterprise. The result is describe as a " software wasteland ". An " integration hairball ". A kludge that gets the job done, sort of.  There are gaps .  There is fragmentation . Bucket brigades are needed to connect things together. And this has been normalized. Effectively, current accounting information systems are based on the knee-jerk reaction of IT folks implementing software to satisfy the immediate need of an enterprise; and so what you have is an accumulation of “stuff”, a chance product, which an accumulation of incremental adjustments. What if a different approach were used?  What if, rather than a chance product, a conscious and deliberate designed effort was used to create industrial processes which were scalable? What if the fundamental characteristics of...
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Work System

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At it's essence, a work system is the real-world system where people and technology combine to get something done. Steven Alter explains the work system in his work system theory (WST) in his paper,  Work System Theory: Overview of Core Concepts, Extensions, and Challenges for the Future .  Per that theory, a work system has six basic ingredients (components) : Participants : who performs the work Activities and processes : actual work performed Information : what participants use to perform the work Technologies : tools that assist in the performance of the work Products and services : output from the work activities and processes Customers : those who receive value from the work Those six ingredients above interact within three contextual elements which are: Environment : external factors which the work system cannot control but rather must adapt to Strategies : guiding intent or direction choices made which shapes how the work system operates Infrastructure : shared techni...
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Platforms and Ecosystems

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Sometimes when we look at things from a different vantage point we see things which we don't see from other vantage points. Platform The essence of a platform is this : A platform is an enabling foundation that others can build on. A platform is a shared foundation of rules and resources that allows independent actors to build, connect, and create value on top of that platform.  The notion of a platform exists for computer systems, for economic systems, and for institutional systems. Larry Keeley is a director of Deloitte Consulting LLP and president and co-founder of its innovation practice, Doblin . He is a strategist who has worked over three decades to develop more effective innovation methods. In a Business Week article, " The Greatest Innovations of All Time ", Larry Keeley points out that most of the greatest inventions of all time were "platforms."  He defines a platform as: broad capabilities that have the potential to cut across industries, markets, an...
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Agentic AI

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There is no universal definition of agentic AI currently, but this blogpost summarizes what I have been able to piece together.  Predictive AI analyzes historical data to find patterns and make calculated guesses about future outcomes or unobserved events based on that historical data and patterns it finds. It doesn’t create anything new; instead, it classifies data or estimates probabilities. Generative AI automates the creation of text, images, videos, and other output by "chatting" with an LLM using human language.  Agentic AI is different predictive and generative AI.  In agentic AI , software agents act, pursue goals,  make decisions similar to how a human does, and does not need to be supervised constantly by a human. In addition to agentic AI agents acting and making decisions; agentic AI agents can provide value by enabling humans to make better decisions.  An agentic AI agent might make better decisions than a human might make (i.e. higher quality) or...
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Refactoring the Office of the CFO

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PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Anthropic have announced a partnership which effectively significantly disrupts how the office of the CFO will work going forward, Anthropic and PwC Expand Alliance, Driving Impact Across Client Work and the Firm . The partnership accelerates a shift from “accountants doing tasks” to “accountants supervising AI agents that perform tasks inside governed workflows.”   This is already happening inside PWC’s own finance operations and in client deployments. Let the refactoring begin! Per the article, PwC and Claude are selling governance, not just agent speed , the value of the PWC and Claude combination is auditability , risk controls , and regulated workflow design;  and not simply faster agent output. According to Digital Applied ; 3 of the Big 4 now run on Anthropic' s Claude: PWC, Deloitte, and KPMG.  EY is using Microsoft. Anthropic’s foundation models and agentic tools are fully proprietary.  These include Claude , Claude Code , and...
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