How business intelligence has changed management accountants’ profession and roles?
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2017
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Accounting
Language
en
Pages
133
Series
Abstract
Technology is an ever changing phenomenon which effects widely to organizations and different members in them. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems influenced management accountants’ job description in the past and nowadays Business Intelligence transforms their roles even further. Some may be worried that their job will disappear because of routinization and automation of manual work, but this only means that new tasks and responsibilities are directed to accounting professionals. They can use the time saved for example for more in-depth analysis and strategic work. Past studies have not put enough emphasis for this change, instead academics have researched widely ERP implementation, and thus it seemed rational to study BI in accounting environment. The goal of this research is to study how Business Intelligence has changed accounting profession and management accountant’s role and presents a more comprehensible definition for BI than just some certain system. The research was conducted by first studying relevant literature about Business Intelligence and development of management accountants’ roles and constructing a literature review. There are not lot academic writings about this phenomenon, hence the deficit of relevant studies was brought to day light. After some discussions and consideration, field study seemed to be appropriate method to study the subject and 8 semi-structured interviews were conducted. Interviewees were management accountant and represented different business fields and amount of experience varied to obtain interesting findings. In the end empirical findings were connected to prior literature and there was a comparative discussion about the phenomenon and conclusions were made. The findings implicate that management accountants clearly have more comprehensible role than before and issues like future and business orientation are emphasized in modern organizations. ERP systems have lacks and BI complements those systems by offering views to future. Additionally new skills are required from management accountants such as IT and social skills. The expanded definition of BI is presented and through empirical findings it is evident that BI can be understood as much more than just a specific system per se. Usually the main task of these systems is to collect data from different sources and combine it to sensible information and knowledge. Moreover BI systems should not be implemented just because other companies are doing it, but organizations have to really analyze what do they use these systems for and what are the possible benefits from them, hence the implementation cannot be an intrinsic value. New kinds of roles were found for management accountants, which were consultant and educator to mention few of them. In the future there will be probably much more new ones related to data management or something similar.Description
Thesis advisor
Silvola, HannaKeywords
business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, role of accounting, management accountant, knowledge management