What, then, is the biggest XBRL challenge from an IRO standpoint?
The challenge is getting educated and feeling comfortable with what elements are being chosen—and being comfortable with how your own financials are converted into XBRL. That comes down to understanding not the technology, per se, but rather how your financial guys define your statements using XBRL tags, as well as how your industry or market peers and competitors do the same thing. Those are the kinds of questions analysts will start focusing on—e.g., “Your peers use this particular tag for ‘inventory’—why don’t you?” IROs need to get used to that, and need to start thinking what questions analysts and investors will be asking about how they’re using this. The second big challenge from an IR standpoint is that management is going to begin looking to the IRO to figure out how you can use this. IROs will need to say, “This is an opportunity. What can I do when this data starts coming through and is more readily available?” For example, you’ll want to look at other IR websites to see wha
