هوش تجاری و آنالیز کسب و کار در تحقیقات حسابداری مدیریت Business intelligence & analytics in management accounting research: Status and future focus

1. Introduction Business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) technologies facilitate data collection, analysis and information delivery and are designed to support decision-making. Given that management accounting (MA) is a decision-supporting activity, there is an obvious link between BI&A and management accounting (AICPA, 2013; Cokins, 2009; Maisel and Cokins, 2014). This link is important, as BI& A is high on the corporate agenda of many organizations (Colombus, 2014; Colombus, 2015; Research and Markets, 2015; PwC, 2016), and executives believe that better data analysis and decision support create value for their companies (Elbashir et al., 2013; Kiron et al., 2014). Thus, management accounting has much to gain from successfully integrating BI&A techniques into managerial accounting tasks. This interest is also reflected in the professional accounting bodies’ agendas, so much so that in 2016, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) called for research on ‘analytics’ by offering grants to undertake studies in this area (CIMA, 2016b). Given the current business focus on BI&A and its perceived management importance, this solution domain should be an area of focus of AIS research. However, commentators have noted that although “there is potential for studying business intelligence solutions in general and their implications for decision making and control, our current understanding of these developments in the accounting academia is very limited” (Granlund, 2011, p. 10). To assess whether these reservations are valid, an extensive literature search is carried out in over sixty accounting and information system journals. Literature reviews are essential, as they save time and effort for future researchers and lead to the efficient advancement of new knowledge and of the discipline (Webster and Watson, 2002). The specific aims of this review are twofold: 1. Critically review and evaluate the volume and content of literature that has focused on the relationship between BI&A and management accounting. 2. Based on the review, highlight research gaps and opportunities for future research. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 conceptualizes the link between MA and BI&A. This is necessary, as there are numerous definitions of BI&A in use and there is some confusion regarding how this technology is linked to other emerging technologies such as big data, machine learning and the Internet-of-things. Section 3 explains the two-staged literature review, initially providing a review of the recent themes in the IS literature and then giving an overview of the articles selected for the second review on the link between management accounting and BI&A. Section 4 contains the review and the findings, organized into 5 themes identified during the analysis of the articles and a summary of research questions to be explored in the future. Section 5 concludes the paper.