XBRL® For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Exchanging Business Information

In This Chapter

• Looking at business reporting and its objectives

• Realizing business reporting is part of business information exchange

• Examining the business drivers that impact business information exchange

• Seeing new possibilities and approaches to exchanging business information

Wondering what business information exchange really is? Answering that question is the topic of this chapter. Business reports and reporting are a subset of the bigger area of business information exchange. Don't limit yourself by thinking of business information exchange only as the exchange of reports.

In this chapter, we look at what business information exchange is all about, how it's practiced today, what its objectives are, dynamics impacting business information exchange from a business and technical perspective, and how all these things work together to impact business information exchange. We end the chapter by painting a picture of a new model of business information exchange.

Streamlining Cross-System Exchanges

Businesses have been doing cross-system information exchanges for years. If you've ever been on a business trip or vacation in a foreign country and wanted to get cash from an automated teller machine and wondered how that happens, you're experiencing the results of years of effort and billions of dollars to make these types of transactions possible with just a few button pushes or clicks of a mouse by you. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke's third law ...