Industrial Talk is onsite at OMG, Q1 Meeting and talking to Claude Baudoin, Co-Chair of Business Modeling and Integration Task Force with OMG about "Standard Business Reporting Model (SBRM)".
The conversation revolved around the need for a standardized business reporting model to improve efficiency and rigor in reporting across various domains. Claude Baudoin and Scott MacKenzie discussed the initiative's origins in response to increasing regulatory requirements and the importance of defining semantic relationships, constraints, and formulas. They also touched on the need to enhance reporting consistency and semantic rigor across domains, with a focus on standardizing a metamodel to enable tools to produce compliant reports. Later, Claude and Scott MacKenzie discussed the significance of standardization in the tech industry, with Claude emphasizing the importance of OMG standards like UML, and Scott MacKenzie highlighting the need for dynamic documents that keep up with time.
Action Items
[ ] Continue discussions with regulators and agencies to adopt the SBRM standard for defining their report formats.
[ ] Market the SBRM standard to tool vendors so they can build software that produces compliant reports.
[ ] Reach out to Claude via email (claude@omg.org) or LinkedIn to learn more or get involved with OMG's work.
Outline
Standardization and innovation in industry with OMG experts.
Industry professionals gather at Q1 quarterly meeting to discuss solutions and standards.
Scott MacKenzie and Claude Boudoir discuss OMG's impact on technology standards and industry collaboration.
Standardizing business reporting to improve accuracy and efficiency.
Standard Business Reporting model aims to make reports more rigorous and machine-readable.
Claude discusses how standardizing reporting can improve efficiency and accuracy in various industries.
Claude emphasizes importance of standardized reporting to ensure accuracy and efficiency in the financial industry.
Standardizing business reporting using a metamodel to ensure consistency and accuracy.
Claude explains the Standard Business Reporting model as a metamodel for various industries.
Claude: Standardize metamodel for semantic relationships in reports (OMG)
Claude: Tool vendors will create models compliant with standardized metamodel (SBRM)
Standardizing business reporting with OMG.
Claude explains the importance of marketing the standard to regulators and industry stakeholders.
Claude and Scott MacKenzie discuss the need for iterative feedback and vetting of the standard.
OMG standardizes documents through iterative revisions, ensuring dynamic updates.
Scott MacKenzie interviews Claude about OMG's work in standardizing business reporting.
Claude provides valuable insights on the challenges of creating regulatory reports.
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Welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get
00:21
by right once again, welcome to Industrial Talk, the number one industrial related podcast that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, brave, you dare greatly you innovate. You collaborate, you solve problems, you are making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk. Now, there's no noise in the background, because we are broadcasting from OMG, the quarterly meeting q1 quarterly meeting here in Reston, Virginia. And well, pretty much everybody's behind closed doors now. And they're they're doing things like solving problems debating standards and making you don't even know what they do. But they make your life better. Just FYI. It's all buried into the stuff that you do what you don't know it. That's what they do. So they're the unsung hero. He's in the hot seat again, Claude, and we're going to be talking about Standard Business Reporting model. Let's get a crack in a club. Hi,
01:16
again, I was so nice to see you, Scott. Oh, yeah.
01:20
It's fantastic. Is it a good meeting,
01:24
it's been a good meeting. So far, we've actually got some advances towards projects do develop new standards in certain areas. So we're pretty happy about the progress.
01:36
I like the I like the fact that I can wander around the rooms. And everybody's sort of, I don't know, focused on their computer, but then they're also on the flip board. And they're on, they've got the charts up there. And they're debating in the boxes in the arrows and all of the things that make make the process productive. And then of course, I'm in and I cannot say this enough, I love the engagement, everybody. There's nobody just sort of everybody's like, focused.
02:04
And what I don't see is that they're gonna keep meeting next week and the week after and the week after by teleconference to keep doing the work. These meetings are a great place to gather everyone together, get agreement, make some decisions have some votes. But a lot of the hard work is happening in between, in lots of teleconferences, you have some people, you know, getting up at 6am, and other people staying up until midnight in order to participate in those discussions.
02:36
It's it's, it's it's a beautiful thing. It really is. And again, as I continue to learn more and more about OMG go out to home g.org To find out more, but more I find out about them. Is that how much of an impact they've had in just things that we just just take for granted. I mean,
02:57
your cell phone console software. Yeah, that was standardized by OMG. Three years ago. Yeah. See?
03:04
There you go. That's That's exactly. Alright. For the listeners out there, Claude. Give us a little background, a little 411 on who you are. Oh,
03:12
so my name is Claude boudoir. I have a small independent consulting company on Enterprise Architecture say bae? Is it a knowledge management, I do enterprise architecture, business processes, and knowledge management. And I have been roaming the hallways of OMG for like 30 years. I worked in the oil and gas industry for a while but in an IT role, not in the field. And then I've been a consultant for the last 15 years.
03:44
All right. Last time we spoke, we talked about the necessity for standards, the trustworthy of standards, and how that really helps business succeed. This time, we're going to be talking a little bit about Standard Business Reporting model. Can you sort of take us a little through that?
04:04
Yes. So this is an initiative that started when people realize that there's now increasing requirements for formal reporting, in particular to regulatory agencies, but not only you have also reporting needs, even within large corporation, when various divisions report up to headquarters about various things. And the initial focus was about financial reports. But we very quickly discovered, we very quickly discovered that there's all sorts of other domains where they are regulatory or other reporting needs. And there are certain languages that have been invented to capture those reports in such a way that they can be read by your computer, not just by a human, but it does not give you a high level summary and take specification of what the relationships are between the various elements of the report. So a typical report may have numbers for each quarter, and then a fifth column that says this is the sum for the year. Having a language in which you capture those numbers and put them in a machine readable format is not the same thing as specifying that the fifth column must be the sum of the previous four columns. So that's the kind of problem we're trying to solve is, is making it possible to define the semantic relationships. This is a percentage, it should be between zero and 100. This is the annual number, it should be the sum of the four quarters, etc. In order to make the reports more rigorous, easier to create, easier to validate. And so we stepped in and we said, let's define a metamodel, that captures all those semantical, semantic relationships, the constraints, the formulas, etc. So that we help the tool vendors, the regulators, and the end users create and manage coherent, consistent, correct, we do get
06:14
into the conversation around operations outside of the financial that's, you know that that's been around, but from, from my perspective, there's the operational component, are we producing, like, the ability to standardize that.
06:27
So we've been exploring, and actually, even relatively recently, in the history of this effort, which has been going on for a few years now is nearing completion, we've discovered all sorts of areas in which the standard might positively impact things. So one of the last things that came up last year is that the pharmaceutical industry has to report on drug tests, both about their safety and their efficacy. And guess what they an international drug company has to report to the US Federal, sorry, Food and Drug Administration. But they have to report to, let's say, a European organization that requires reports in a completely different format. But it's still the same numbers. So modeling that allowing the regulator's to say, I can define a report model that's compliant with a higher level of semantic structure is going to help that industry. The last thing actually I was met, met someone yesterday, who is working on environmental sustainability reporting, there you go. So sustainability is becoming of course, a big thing. You've got all these ESG stuff, environments, sustainability and governance. Well, companies are now having to produce reports to their shareholders or to certain regulators, perhaps more in Europe at this point than in the US, but it's coming. And you have same thing, you have to ensure that the semantic of the report is correct. So it's you just don't want to give an Excel spreadsheet in which the fifth column might not be the sum of the other four columns.
08:14
Just just the standard, the this ability to standardize the reporting, and in when we start talking about the sharing of information through the reporting doesn't help it make it more efficient. There's that question. So if I'm, if I have the standard reporting process, and it just makes it easier for me that know that the it's accurate. And as well as I can understand the flow? Is that what we're trying to get to? Yeah,
08:44
so you have to remember that OMG, our late Chairman Richard Souli used to say, we don't do standards for the essentially for the sake of standards, we do standards to create markets. And in this case, the market is the vendors of reporting software, because there are many companies that help organizations create their reports, by selling them software in which you know, you input the numbers, and it spits out the report for the Securities and Exchange Commission. But if those vendors have a common semantic framework, they can hang their software on then that software is going to produce better reports, it's not going to let some errors slip in. And so that's going to make the life of the regulators easier, and the life of the regulated easier by making sure you don't produce a report that gets rejected. So you just
09:45
don't know where you begin. I mean, that's huge because just just an ERP. Yep. Let's just ERP it, that that everybody has an ERP to a certain extent, they all generate certain reports and it's it's It's the wild west
10:01
and the way the reports are produced today, you may you may get the correct numbers from your ERP system. But in the food chain that produces the final report that goes out, all sorts of things can happen because you don't have a you don't have the rules and the constraints that ensure that as you move that data through towards the final report that the semantic relationships are, are, are kept or maintained. Now, the standard reporting, the Standard Business Reporting model is not a model of a specific type of report. It's a metamodel, from which people can instantiate reports for pharmaceutical for energy for aeronautics, you know, the air worthiness of airplanes, sustainability, it's just been a topic, which has been a topic Exactly, we shall not name companies do not. So various regulators or agencies, sir, can take the metamodel that we are going to standardize and instantiate it into report models, and then say, Oh, now, Mr. Company XYZ, you use this report model, which is compliant with SBR. M, to produce the report, you're gonna file with us every quarter?
11:22
And, you know, it's good. I don't have a real pushback on that. Day data, you know, bad data going in bad reports coming out. And no matter it, do you address the data? Yeah. So we've been in
11:42
ta. So finally, at the end of:
13:35
we how do you begin? Can I do this incrementally? It's not. I mean, if I hear what you're saying, and I agree with you, 100%. And I want to ensure that my reports are top notch I want, you know, because I'm making decisions off of these reports, and I just How do I even begin what what is what do you recommend? And can I do it just incrementally and saying, Okay, we're gonna try our financials. And that's sort of a, that's a no brainer. Let's try to get them in line with,
14:06
well, the food chain, I actually did a little food chain diagram once in during the discussions we were having the food chain is that OMG is going to standardize this metamodel. The tool vendors are going to take that and say, Okay, now we can create models that contain semantic relationships that are compliant with that the regulators or the clients have their reports. Sometimes as I said before, it could be the headquarters of a corporation that requires reporting from its various divisions and subsidiaries, they're going to say, that's what their report should contain. And column E should be the sum of columns ABCD, and they're going to put that formula in their model. Then, when the user inputs data, which may come from a spreadsheet from scraps of paper, etc. Do Then the tool is going to say, you're good, or it doesn't add up. And the tool will now know that it should add up, because that's what SBR M allows you to specify. When
15:12
we start talking about regulators, that's the government point of clarification tool vendors like, like people
15:18
who do software that is sold as being, this will be your report producing software that is going to extract numbers from your ERP system and your sales database, etc. And he's going to produce a report in the format that the Stock Exchange Commission requires,
15:41
then, how do you link the regulatory component, let's say, and what you're doing, as you create this model.
15:50
So we're gonna have to convince I mean, there's gonna be a little bit of a marketing of this standard, once it's adopted, we're gonna have to convince the regulators that when you define a report format, and a report model, and what data you want in that report, you're going to use as BRM, to understand what you can specify in there. So instead of just expecting that the annual number is the sum of the four quarterly numbers, you're now going to have a way to specify it formally. So we need to explain to these people this is how you're going to use this standard is now you're going to be able to specify these things. And the reporting software can now embed these rules that you have defined. So it gives the regulator in a sense, a bit more power. But it also makes it instead of after the fact reading a report and say the fifth column is not the sum of the four columns, you're now going to know that it's going to be correct, because it's been created by SBRM compliant tools.
16:56
I'm glad you pointed out that there has to be some marketing, because you have to get the regulator's on board with of course, yes, this the standard and saying, and we will make to make you your life easier, whatever.
17:06
We've already talked to quite a number of people, and we are going to keep doing that. This, that's that party is a protracted effort, no question, it's not gonna happen overnight, we're gonna have to, you know, go and talk to people, we've already talked to a number of people in the US government, in the financial domain, but one of the people who submitted one proposal for SB RM, since we are in the process of reviewing submissions right now, is working for a consulting company that is defining right now and ontology for a pharmaceutical company. And so we're already we're already involved in talking to people who might have a dialogue with the Food and Drug Administration about what their report should contain. So we're starting to make inroads into who do we need to convince that this report is going to help
18:05
you get iterative to let's say, you haven't you come up with a standard, you come up with a, a thoroughly vetted standard that you guys do very well. And then you publish that standard. And then that you have to approach these other entities. And then I would imagine these other entities will say, hey, that's great. Tweak it this way. And then you come back, and how do you how do you iterate that way? So
18:31
on as June of this year, June:
19:47
I like that because then it doesn't become static. It's a dynamic document that keeps up with the time and as we were speaking offline, the times are changing quickly.
19:59
You know, the Unify Modeling Language, which is sort of almost a flagship product over the OMG. We're on version 2.5, or something like that, you know, so there was a major revision to, and there were five minor revisions already to version two. And some people are discussing probably in a room not far from where we are right now. What should we put in version three, which might be again, they a significant reengineering of the foundational model of that standard.
20:28
You know, like that. That's, that's good stuff. You guys are doing some really heavy lifting, but real important work.
20:37
Thank you.
20:38
How do people get a hold of you?
20:40
So the simplest address to reach me with respect to mg work is claude@omg.org. Claude CLA UD at O M. g.org.
20:52
Did you do on you're so active on LinkedIn?
20:56
lleagues and people. I've got:
21:12
you go. Right there. Claude, you were absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much for being on Industrial Talk. Do you never disappoint here? Well, you're a star.
21:21
Thanks for your work. You're doing great. Well,
21:23
thank you very much. All right, listeners. We're gonna have all the contact information for Claude out in on Industrial Talk, you know, that reach out to him. They're doing a lot of great work here at OMG. Go to omg.org. Once again, we are at q1 the quarterly meeting from an OG here in Reston, Virginia. And I'm telling you, it's exciting. So thank you very much for joining. We will be right back.
21:46
You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.
21:56
How about that conversation? Claude never never ever, ever, ever disappoints. He is a sage when it comes to anything. Always a great conversation. We haven't. We have another interview out there with Claude two as well on Industrial Talk. And, and again, hitting home runs all the time. We talked about definitely the standardization of business reporting, which is really an interesting challenge. Being a part of many companies. It is a challenge to standardize those reports, those regulatory reports and making sure that they're there. Boy, whenever you try to create these reports, oh my gosh, it's all hands on deck. Great job, but go out to omg.org be a part of that organization. Great people are involved in that organization. All right. Go out to Industrial Talk. You have a podcast. You want to be out on Industrial Talk. Yes, you do. You want to be out there. Let's have a conversation. Be bold, be brave, daring, greatly hanging out with Claude change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly.
