Interchangeable Parts: Information Lego Blocks

In 1798 a significant shift occurred when the concept of “interchangeable parts” was perfected when Ely Whitney applied that idea to the manufacture of rifles.  Before interchangeable parts, all goods created around the globe where individually created by a skilled craftsmen.

An interchangeable part is a part or component that is created to a specific specification and is identical to other parts and will fit into an assembly that requires that part/component.  No customization was required to make the part/component fit into the assembly. This enables easy assembly, a reduction in the skills required to assemble, easier repair, which minimizes time and cost.

OMG's forthcoming Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) going to be an enabler of “interchangeable parts” for business reporting in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Information Age.

While in the 1790s the concept of interchangeable parts enabled to creation of machining tools that could create the precision parts necessary to enable the feature of interchangeability; SBRM will enable to create tools, such as software tools, than enable this information component interchangeability.

This notion of “information component interchangeability” has already been implemented in five software applications that I have helped to create in varying degrees.  The most extensive implementation of this has been in Auditchain’s Pacioli (logic engine and verification tool) and Luca (part of the Auditchain Suite which is an expert system tool for creating financial reports).  The notion of a “jig” was first created and used in Pesseract about 4 years ago with mild success.  Luca fully supports the notion of a “jig” which enables application users to work with higher level logical structures rather than with the individual “atoms” that make up those structures.  All five software applications implemented the notion of the “block” when enables the creation of jigs among other things.

SBRM can enable the creation and exchange of INFORMATION at both the semantic (meaning, logic) level and the syntax (physical format, technical specification) level.  XBRL is one global standard technical syntax that is broadly used.

Today; financial accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis artifacts are created by costly highly skilled craftsmen.  In the near future, because of SBRM and the interchangeable information parts/components that it enables to be created will revolutionize financial accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis.  This is but one example of what SBRM could do for general business reporting globally.

Think of it like this.  Think “Lego Blocks”.  Mark Cossey, in a LinkedIn post, provided the graphic shown below.  Data that is sorted, classified, structured, arranged, and represented to be consumable by both humans and machines results in actionable information.

The Lego Blocks will be modern spreadsheets, hooked together with logic rather than layout oriented artifacts like rows, columns, and cells. Modern approaches to building accounting and auditing workpapers will be used.

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