The future of management accounting in the digital era - Explorative study of using Big Data in data-driven decision-making
No Thumbnail Available
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
Ask about the availability of the thesis by sending email to the Aalto University Learning Centre oppimiskeskus@aalto.fi
Authors
Date
2018
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Accounting
Language
en
Pages
74 + 1
Series
Abstract
The operating environment of today is constantly evolving as technology has developed and become increasingly available for consumers and businesses. Within this technological revolution the volume of the data generated globally today will be twice as much in a time-period of little over a year. As a phenomenon, the recent explosion of data is often referred to the era of Big Data, which has led to digitalization having a presence in every part of business in the global economy of today. Organizations are facing increasing competition as the data-driven environment provides significant opportunities to grasp on, presenting the traditional accounting scenery with both challenges and opportunities. The goal of this study is to explore the role of Big Data in top management’s decision-making from the perspective of management accounting, and to understand if and how these might act in unison in the current digital era of business. Furthermore, the study attempted to map the opportunities and challenges of Big Data in data-driven decision-making of top management, and set an outlook for the future development of the management accounting practice within this scope. This thesis was conducted as an explorative case study, where the nature of the study is a preliminary investigation in the currently occurring and growing phenomenon. The empirical findings were gathered from five semi-structured interviews in a Finnish subsidiary of a leading global technology company. The case company findings state Big Data as an essential part of every organization’s decision-making and operational processes in the future. While data has been utilized before in decision-making, it has never reached the quantities as it currently has. Management accounting is seen to be in a beneficial position to gain significant advantages from Big Data in its purpose of supporting top management’s data-driven decision-making. Big Data utilization is seen as tool that can help management accounting to expand its role to provide enhanced insights of the surroundings and future outlooks of the organizations operations. While not necessarily providing a separated source of information, it is seen as a valuable addition for management accounting in increasing analysis accuracy, reducing the need of intuition and mitigating bias. Big Data is not currently a widely adopted solution or even an integral source of information for top management’s decision-making. However, even today Big Data can form the starting point for top management’s data-driven decision-making.Description
Thesis advisor
Vaivio, JuhaniKeywords
big data, data-driven decision-making, top management, management accounting