XBRL or Master Data Management?
Master data management (MDM) and eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) are two key technologies that promise to address important information management issues. Ventana Research believes both will enable companies to reduce the cost, time and effort needed to collect, analyze and use information, whether for visibility, decision support or process execution. Some observers may see them as competing approaches, but in practice each has capabilities best suited to some applications and not others. Even where they overlap, the two may not be mutually exclusive. We advise companies that have not yet begun investigating XBRL and MDM to do so immediately, and all organizations should begin developing skills in using them.
