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The DATA Act Meets Salesforce.com's Government Cloud (Hopefully)

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Salesforce.com taxi! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Salesforce.com rolled out three cloud initiatives for the government sector last week in—where else?—Washington, DC, with---who else?— its recently appointed executive vice president of emerging markets, Vikek Kundra, leading the presentation.

As the former first Chief Information Officer of the United States, Kundra surely has a rich list of contacts in the government IT sector, which undoubtedly will help Salesforce.com push its way further into this sector. But these days—these skin tight-budget, austerity-is-the-new-black days--government cloud initiatives can almost sell themselves.

In other words: you don’t have to be Salesforce.com to take advantage of the macro trends shaping this industry. Other cloud vendors have a strong presence in this space—RightNow Technologies, one of Oracle’s many acquisitions being a chief example, as well as AT&T, Dell and Microsoft.

Salesforce.com’s timing though with its new release couldn’t have been any better if it had tried.

The DATA Act

Almost on the same day Salesforce.com’s Government Cloud debuted, the House of Representatives—fueled by the specter of government employees partying at a Vegas conference on the taxpayers’ dime—passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or Data Act. It will require federal agencies to report spending information on a searchable Web platform.

This act could wind up being more than just a nose-thumbing, comeuppance gesture at government managers that dare to drop $800,000 plus on a fancy conference, depending on how it is implemented—and depending, of course, if it gets passed into law.

Namely, for once and for all, the act could lead to one widely-accepted standard for publishing electronic information about federal spending.

That was a point made by Barry C. Melancon, president and CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, who points out in a letter to Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and its ranking member Elijah Cummings that the bill, in fact, calls for the incorporation of existing nonproprietary standards—and here Melancon helpfully adds as illustration: like the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

XBRL creates intelligent data by attaching a tag to each piece of data in a financial or business report and having this standard become ubiquitous is probably among the accounting industry’s biggest goals.

Not that any of this is going to happen soon. Besides the aforementioned need to get this act passed into law – no small task with this Congress – XBRL is about as exciting as well, just about every major accounting issue ever, such as whether and when the SEC will adopt IFRS or the ongoing convergence projects between FASB and the IASB. There will be no great outcry for its adoption.

The Sex Appeal of Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com, though, glittery and attention-getting Salesforce, is another matter. Just taking up the standard in an app could move it forward. As it happens, Salesforce.com just launched the perfect venue for this to happen.

Besides the dedicated government instance, its Government Cloud initiative comes an AppExchange for government users, from which agencies can pick out apps that work for their needs—replicable, cheaper apps.

Just to give an example of how this works: One of these apps – there are roughly 60 as a starting base – is SchoolForce, which has modules for attendance, behavior, homework, student records and grade book.

Any school district can use it and tailor it for its own needs. It is also portal-based, so parents can track their kids’ progress.

Cloud Computing Big Bang

All of which is nice, but I am looking to a second third and fourth generation iteration of all these trends. Namely, the combination of cloud computing in the government and a push to finally put in place common standards for financial data – and XBRL is as good as any given its acceptance -- could lead to a wealth of new mashable financial data. It could be as significant a development as when the SEC began making available all public company documents via Edgar. Only I am hoping this next-gen development will come with a user-friendlier interface than Edgar.