Management accounting goes digital: Will the move make it wiser?

Abstract

This essay places current fascinations with the digital revolution into the historical and cultural contexts that have intertwined with the evolution of management accounting as a practice involved in the production of knowledge for decision-making. In outlining similarities and differences in the production of management accounting information from aural to digital cultures, it argues that while the effects of the digital revolution on management accounting and decision-making are still unclear, these effects surely (and hopefully) will not deliver the dream of perfect information and rational decision-making as one may be lead to believe by the growth of data-driven organizations and societies. Becoming aware of this impossibility is the first step for bringing wisdom back into decision-making processes and making management accounting gaining central stage again in the organizational arena. Acknowledgements: I wish to thank the founding editors of Management Accounting Research, Bob Scapens and Michael Bromwich, for their kind invitation to join a panel to reflect on the future of management accounting at the 25 th Anniversary Conference of the Journal, celebrated at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 17 April 2015. I also thank Wim Van der Stede, who chaired the panel, for inviting me to develop my thoughts further for this article, and even more so for his patience in waiting for this manuscript to be delivered. I also wish to thank Bob Scapens, again, and especially, as some of the thinking he has stimulated in all of these years of fruitful collaboration is contained in these pages. The usual disclaimers apply. Words are important "Chi parla male, pensa male e vive male. […] Le parole sono importanti."

Digitalization in management accounting and control: an editorial

“…Most of the papers are largely conceptual (e.g. Bhimani & Willcocks, 2014;Quattrone, 2016;Arnaboldi, Busco, & Cuganesan, 2017a, b;Appelbaum et al, 2017), with some case studies (Arnaboldi, Azzone, & Sidorova, 2017a, b) and empirical analyses (Labro et al, 2019;Oesterreich et al, 2019). The field still appears dominated by consultants and practice pioneers (e.g.…”

Determinants of information system quality and data quality in management accounting

“…Being an integral part of MA, IS and MA should therefore be jointly studied (Dechow and Mouritsen 2005). In organizational practice, rather than questioning IS data, the data output is usually regarded as given; thus, managers often "blindly" rely on accounting numbers (Quattrone 2016). However, IS quality in MA varies widely and may thus determine the extent to which the data meet management accountants' information requirements, which we refer to as management accounting data quality (MADQ).…”

Visualising a “good game”: analytics as a calculative engine in a digital environment

“…In the era of the digital economy, it seems that the instantaneous manner of acting on data-driven insights is encouraged by some (Bhimani and Willcocks, 2014;Seufert, 2013), while cautioned by others (Busco and Quattrone, 2018;Quattrone, 2016). For the proponents of datadriven decision-making, organisational actors should be inclined to use new types of data as much as possible, while others suggest that these figures should be approached more cautiously, and they should be seen more as platforms for mediation and initiators of discussion, instead of representations of immutable truths (Quattrone, 2016). This type of debate over the interpretation of how to approach quantification and numerical inscriptions is nothing new (see for example Robson, 1992;Latour, 1999), nevertheless, and even more so, during the digital era we are living in right now, it should be an important subject of discourse.…”

“…The question of what the implications of this revolution are for management accounting and control is an interesting and debatable subject, which has been highlighted by several accounting scholars (see e.g. Arnaboldi et al, 2017;Bhimani and Willcocks, 2014;Quattrone, 2016). The existing management accounting literature has seen accounting or accountingrelated calculative practices (Miller, 2001) as the key mediators between multiple and distinct actors, aspirations, domains and arenas (Jeacle and Carter, 2012;Maier, 2017;Miller and O'Leary, 2007).…”