Forgive me members for I have sinned. It’s been four months since I updated the blog for the Council. Let me catch you all up with some brief snippets – and I promise to be more diligent with my writing.

Fidelity Ventures, Asset Control and Tap Solutions – It didn’t take Phil Lynch long to make this deal happen. Private equity money finding its way toward investing in EDM platforms is a sure sign of the continuing maturity of this business. I, for one, am pleased to see it happen. A little more muscle behind the infrastructure for data management and a bit of healthy platform competition is a good thing indeed. Nicely done, Mr. Lynch – welcome back into the data business.

XBRL – the Council is a member of the Securities and Financial Markets Association’s Data Management Division. We are involved with one of their sub-groups looking into the use of XBRL by broker/dealers. It’s the right thing to do (of course), but I was taken back by the lack of understanding of just what XBRL is and why it is important to the financial industry. And I don’t fault them – I fault those of us involved in standards (because we clearly haven’t done the right job in positioning these activities to senior management).

Let me take a wild stab at it. All of these XML initiatives are two things. First (and foremost) they are a way of standardizing terms, definitions and their business relationships to facilitate comparison between data and to ensure precision in how that data can be used to feed applications. Second, they are XML which can make it easier for firms to process data. I don’t care so much about the XML side – that’s for technologists. I do care about standardizing terms and definitions however. That’s the foundation of effective data management. If these conversations are any indication, we’ve got a long way to go to get this concept appropriately positioned.

ISO 19312 – Don’t worry, I’m not planning on going into this in detail. I just think we’re chasing the wrong objective with this activity and it worries me. ISO 19312 is an initiative designed to create a standard UML data model for the financial industry. How that got to be the objective I’ll never know – but it certainly wasn’t the objective that was originally put on the table and it’s not something that financial institutions are planning on using. I know. I asked.