Assessment and critique in academic research

¶ … Hannon (2005), "the advances in computer processing power, storage capabilities, and the development of more ways to add information to data have paved the way for a radically new approach to collecting, storing, retrieving, and reporting business information: to build an entire information system around data, not around applications."

Hannon states that application-centric approaches have limited data reuse because they require proprietary formats and because they cannot provide relevant context when data is shared outside of the application that created the transaction. The author believes that XBRL holds the key to freeing up the data created by applications.

Hannon describes how XML tags such as XBRL-GL will allow metadata or information about data to be added to the data. Thus, the information for understanding the data is moved from the application to the data itself so that the content can be used in an application-independent way. As a result, organizations have the ability to easily reuse the data and users can drill down into the data to better understand how it was created.

2. Article Critique

Hannon's article appears to imply that organizations should start moving to a data-centric approach to data management and he provides a reasonable argument for why organizations should make this transition. However, there's no supporting of evidence of companies that have actually been successful doing so or industry trends. and, there's no frank discussion of technology maturity and possible limitations or concerns. For example, how much time and money will an organization need to spend tagging data and how will they develop the tags in a way that is readily accepted as a standard across the organization? With increased data availability, how will an organization protect information from being accessed and changed without permission and how will an organization accommodate acceptable performance for increased consumption of data?

The increased availability of data and claims that it is more reliable may also pose greater risk for an organization. Hannon mentions that it will be easier to determine if data is in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley internal control framework. However, it seems equally likely that it will also be easier to determine if it is not in compliance. So, as an organization exposes its data via XBRL, the company will also have to simultaneously make a greater effort to make sure that it is accurate. Just because it is easier to understand how the data is created with the use of XBRL doesn't necessarily mean that the quality of the data is higher than before.

3. A critique of my assessment of the article.