Deterioro funcional y cognitivo:

Part of accounting research is concentrated on the question how change in management accounting and subsequently in the roles of management accountants takes place. The question has been tackled from many different perspectives, such as investigating the change process itself or factors initializing change. Most relevant to our study is the research concerning change drivers. Figure 4 summarizes all the different change drivers identified in prior research as impacting the controller’s role (see Friedman & Lyne 1997, Granlund & Lukka 1997;1998, Chenhall & Langfield-Smith 1998, Vaivio 1999, Burns &

Scapens 2000, Granlund & Malmi 2002, Scapens & Jazayeri 2003, Burns &

Baldvinsdottir 2005, Järvenpää 2007).

Change has clearly been seen to emanate from wide business environment contingencies (globalization, increased competition, and different managerial philosophies gaining ground) as well as organizational context (accounting innovations and information systems in use). It is important to notice that all the while some of these change drivers can be seen as unmanageable and given, something an organization has to “deal” with, most of them are controllable and should be managed. They are not simply things that randomly impact the MA’s role, they need to be understood as a means to introduce change and consciously contribute to the MA’s role development.

Controller's role

Today, organizations’ information needs are undeniably different than just a few decades ago. As management accountants are organizational information providers, any changes within the organization’s information needs are obviously influential to the accountants’

role. First, internationalization and globalization have increased organizations’ reporting responsibilities. Closely connected to internationalization is the increased competition that most organizations are facing nowadays. Fiercely competitive environment has organization management needing faster and more meaningful information to safeguard the company’s agility and ensure profitability.

Competition has also given rise to several managerial philosophies (e.g. TQM, JIT) according to which “not only the design or accounting systems, but also the actual use of accounting information, and the roles of accountants, should change in line with changes in the operational environment, and with the strategies and operational philosophies firms

Figure 4 Factors impacting controller’s role as identified in prior research.

customer and business orientation have increased inside organizations, starting with top management and ending with the shop floor personnel.

Thus, completely new kind of information is also being coveted, such as industry know-how, customer profitability as well as non-financial performance knowledge. Together these three factors (internationalization, increased competition and business orientation) can easily be regarded as change drivers concerning the management accountant’s role.

More to the matter, these factors affect the management accountant’s work in a comprehensive way not only changing the information content (what is reported) but also the context and delivery of it (to whom, how and when is it reported), thus affecting more profoundly the way in which information is provided.

Prior literature has also argued that different kind of accounting innovations or techniques are driving forces when it comes to the management accountant’s role change. Activity-based costing (ABC) and balanced scorecard (BSC) have been seen as increasing the organization and its personnel’s ability to be business oriented, thus resulting in a more business savvy management accountant.

It has been argued that the implementation and use of activity-based techniques demands a high degree of interaction, in e.g. multi-disciplinary teams, between management accountants and operational managers which in turn enables the generation of common understanding and mutual trust to develop between the two. The end result of improved relations should be the provision of more useful information to managers and the decline of the beancounter image. (Friedman & Lyne 1997). Similarly, the balanced scorecard is argued “to connect the accounting function to other parts of the organisation in a more business and future oriented manner, pointing to new possibilities for accounting to intervene in such previously ‘taboo’ areas as product development and marketing, for instance” (Lukka 1998, p. 334).

Also, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been argued to facilitate role change (e.g. Friedman & Lyne 1997). Having sophisticated information systems in place

means that management accountants are able to carry out routine activities more effectively, to handle large databases quickly, and report faster and more flexibly. Hence, ERP implementations (as well as of other systems) are argued to save time in routine activities and create time for management accountants to perform more value added activities. Among Finnish accountants there seems to exist an emerging belief that, at their best, the modern integrated accounting systems might relieve the pressures caused by current reporting routines and give room for more profound analysis and genuine decision support (Granlund & Lukka 1998, p.195).

Clearly, accounting innovations and information systems are factors that can influence the management accountant’s role. However, we see these factors more as facilitators in nature than change drivers. They can support the role expansion but they are not strong enough on their own to induce it. As Friedman and Lyne’s (1997) study shows, ABC can be implemented without the ‘death of the beancounter’. Conversely, the business controller role can exist in an organization not having ABC, too. The same applies to the balanced scorecard and ERP¹⁵. These techniques and systems are all tools that can be operated in very different ways. In their ideal form and application they might require the contemporary business controller to manage them but in reality they might just as well be managed by the beancounter type one. In other words, they are neither change drivers nor prerequisites, they are – facilitators.

As mentioned before in regard to ABC implementation, increased interaction between management accountants and non-accountants has been recognized to bring forth the more contemporary business controller in organizations. It follows, that decentralization is generally listed as a change driver in management accountant’s role literature. When decentralised, the management accounting takes care of the production of standardised and timely financial information for the use of corporate reporting but also offers financial control and decision support in the local units as members of their managerial teams (Granlund & Lukka 1997, p.232). Decentralization is a change facilitator as it

supports more “face time” and trust to build among management accountants and non-accountants.