XBRL Implementation Strategies: The Deeply Embedded Approach, Strategic Finance, November 2009

My fourth and final article in the XBRL Implementation Strategies series – published in the November issue of IMA’s Strategic Finance magazine – discusses the “deeply embedded” approach to XBRL implementation.  

This approach is about extending the benefits of XBRL in terms of significant efficiencies and cost savings in any process based on data integration, aggregation, dissemination and analysis – benefits that are driving XBRL’s growing adoption by governments and regulators worldwide – to internal reporting and auditing, and achieving compliance with XBRL filing requirements not as the main goal of XBRL adoption but rather as an additional benefit.  Alternative approaches, while effective in ensuring compliance, fall short in recognizing the potential of XBRL in addressing key process issues within the corporate information system, and consider it as one additional format in which financial reports can/must be created.  In other words, an additional cost with no direct benefit for businesses, as opposed to an opportunity for re-engineering of processes that are currently mostly manual, absorb significant resources  and generate errors and rework.

The previous articles in the series are How to Make Your Data Interactive (March 2009), The Bolt-on Approach (May 2009), and The Built-in Approach (August 2009).