Digital business reporting standards: mapping the battle in France

Abstract

Government agencies use information technology extensively to collect business data for regulatory purposes. Data communication standards form part of the infrastructure with which businesses must conform to survive. We examine the development of, and emerging competition between, two open business reporting data standards adopted by government bodies in France; Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (EDIFACT) (incumbent) and eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) (challenger). The research explores whether an incumbent may be displaced in a setting in which the contest is unresolved. Latour's translation map is applied to trace the enrollments and detours in the battle. We find that regulators play an important role as allies in the development of the standards. The antecedent networks in which the standards are located embed strong beliefs that become barriers to collaboration and fuel the battle. One of the key differentiating attitudes is whether speed is more important than legitimacy. The failure of collaboration encourages competition. The newness of XBRL's technology just as regulators need to respond to an economic crisis and its adoption by French regulators not using EDIFACT create an opportunity for the challenger to make significant network gains over the longer term. ANT also highlights the importance of the preservation of key components of EDIFACT in ebXML.

Keywords:

• Business Data standards
• EDIFACT
• XBRL
• ebXML
• Actor Network Theory
• France

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the interview participants who gave their time to contribute to this research. The paper has benefited from the comments of participants at the 2008 ICIS Conference in Paris, the 2009 EGOS Colloquium, Barcelona and several local presentations. We would also especially like to thank Professor Peter Standish and this journal's three anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Véronique Guilloux

About the authors

Véronique Guilloux is an Assistant Professor in an international management department at UPEC (France). She is a researcher at Laboratoire d'Economie et Management Nantes-Atlantique (LEMNA). Her research interests are interorganizational systems and EDI. Véronique is currently researching e-government with a special focus on virtualizing process. She has presented her work in international conferences ICIS, WITS and published IS articles in leading French journals including SIM, RAM.

Joanne Locke

Joanne Locke is a senior Lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Finance at the University of Birmingham (U.K.). Her research interest is in the global standardardization of business reporting. Joanne has completed projects on XBRL and ERP systems and published in journals including Organization, IT & People, Accounting Organizations and Society, European Accounting Review and Critical Perspectives on Accounting.

Alan Lowe

Alan Lowe is a Professor of accounting at Aston Business School (U.K.). His research interests include management accounting systems change, ERP and Casemix systems, financial reporting, transparency and accountability and qualitative research methodologies. He has published in journals including Management Accounting Research, Organization Studies, Organization, and Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.