derek abdinor

This first appeared in Techleader, June 2008

I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially financial information, that you would have to re-key into excel or some ERM system to actually use. The web is two way traffic, and in age of openness about data (open source, openID, APIs etc) it rankles me that business information is locked in a bordered, left-aligned and decimalled cage.

All the financial information offered by companies to the markets tends to be of this nature. Analysts and journalists will get the printed annual report or results announcement and ofttimes have to re-key the figures in to develop scenarios and what-ifs. The announcements that listed companies file with the JSE Stock Exchange News Service (SENS) are submitted and viewed as ASCII text. Open Notebook (on a PC), throw an income statement in there and send to the guy who does your tax: it’s brain dead on usability and minimal on usefulness.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is the format that will fix this. About 10 years in the making, it essentially enables all accounting jurisdictions (read: countries on a local level, and GAAP and IFRS on a macro level) to define their own taxonomy and map every single item in their ledger or statutory reports with a pre-agreed tag.

For developers: It’s XML, where the schema is the accounting taxonomy. Your XML doc is your financial statement, and the elements are pre-agreed tags with the values being, well, the figures.
For accountants: It’s choosing line-items from an agreed list and mapping them to your figures. And SAICA has endorsed it. Oh, and SARS too.
For other knowledge workers: Text in Notebook has no structure or meta data with it. But, in Excel, it at least has co-ordinates (eg: A3:C1) and may be part of a sum or total. If you do not prepare financial statements, it will probably be underlying your SAP, Oracle or even your general ledger.

Snapshot of Microsoft’s XBRL filing

Because every figure in your financial statements has an underlying tag, and is referenced in a structure, guess what? You have an API (application programming interface). This allows one to build middle-tier programs that can slice and dice these financials and make them jump through hoops. The business implication is impressive. It means that, through collating and comparing, XBRL-prepared financials, business and investment analysts can compare hundreds of companies where they previously only had time and resources to follow the top leaders in the sector.

China, having mandated XBRL years ago, is now in the pretty situation of having its companies analysed and earmarked for investment in New York and London, because XBRL allows you to compare statements done in different accounting jurisdictions.

Great strides have been taken in South Africa with XBRL South Africa. Recent changes in US listing policy means those South African companies listed in the States have to start filing as XBRL. Not a simple task, remember: you’re now filing XML as opposed to ASCII. It will roll out in South Africa in time, given the JSE’s enthusiasm.

This could open up new markets to companies who prepare their financials, as a matter of course, in XBRL. It could also bring the skills of PHP cowboys to bear on creating viewers and mash-ups and richer documents, and lend some impetus to the Enterprise 2 ideal.

Good link via great chum Elan Lohmann. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft). This is a semantic follow on from a convo we had once at the Gourmet Garage, where scales lifted from my eyes about Google and advertising. This is an established industry, if you read Dorothy L Sayers you’ll see that advertising in the 1930s and the client-agency-paper relationship is wholly recognisable today still.

This first appeared in TechLeader, June 2008

I have this credibility problem with cartoons where, when they regularly reach behind their heads/into their coats, they tend to whip out gadgets/weaponry that outweigh them and flaunt Newton One to Three.

For storylines, its weak. But for concepts like storing terabytes of data and other objects off your local grid, its incredible. And that’s cloud computing, or SAN (Storage Area Networks).

Sign up with a provider of massive amounts of data and processing power, and simply call their services to do the processing, storage, business logic where applicable. It works on a pay-as-you-go model, and is free in some cases.

The best known cloud providers are Amazon Web Services and Google Appengine. It stands to reason, these guys have massive networks of servers that never run at 100%; they may as well tick over while standing “idle”.

If you tweet, use Facebook or Yahoo! apps, you may see the flicker of aws.amazon.com in your status bar, as resources get pulled in. Salesforce is termed a cloud application, as the data, logins and modules are all on various servers far from your office or project.

Nice application

An idea I like is having a cloud at home. No synching between digital camera, PVR, notebook and other consumerist gadgets. If you have wifi at home, simply navigate to the folder from any device. Brilliant. No cables.

Take-up

Powerful. Looking at how nervous MS Office is about online documents (Google, Zoho, Salesforce) is an indication. There are operational risks, and no, Twitter’s essential services don’t run off AWS. At the end of the day, one is party to a contract with a massive going concern.

This closing paragraph links back to the first, to round things off in a homely, Readers’ Digest, kind of way. Can you use cloud services in your enterprise? Is there space for a South African entity to offer this here, and in the continent?

Me, I like my Belgian or British cartoons. Those with credibility gaps I can bestride.

Some think that loadshedding came at the right time, to force people to save power and start thinking along sustainable lines: perhaps even to get back to traditional ways of spending time together.

The same has been bandied about about high petrol (gas) prices.  Raise the price, get people to drive less (less carbon, less demand, build public transport); it all sounds quite sane. Even the apparent side-issue, that the government gets the exponential tax, is worth all the trouble.

That’s what I thought, until I read up on the issue, including Freakonomics articles.

Higher oil prices means more incentive and resources to go looking for oil (in business terms). More supply means the dance of supply and demand could be in full swing. The point is that the same amount of gas will be consumed regardless. The environmental impact of drilling and extracting oil and polluting air, has not lessened or stood still. It grows regardless.

There was a comment that government needs to tax consumers, but also suppliers, punitively. This money can be used somehow, somewhere. That would be another issue to fight.