A U.S. nonprofit consortium is hoping the prospect of a US$20,000 cash prize will help spur the creation of open-source software tools companies can use to work with the XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) standard for financial reporting.

XBRL is a version of XML defined to meet the requirements of business and financial information. With XBRL, unique identifying tags are applied to financial data items.

IBM's Data Governance Council, a group of 50 large financial companies and other organizations worldwide, on Monday announced an initiative aimed at persuading the industry to adopt XBRL (extensible business reporting language) as a standard for risk reporting.

Given all the pressures IT is under, another compliance initiative may seem to be one too many. There is such a mandate: to submit financial reports using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) tags. How much will the XBRL mandate add to IT's burden? At first, the burden will be small, but it will increase over time -- as will the opportunity to use XBRL for better internal operations, not just for reporting compliance.