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Mini-series Part 3: Digitalization and the accountant

October 1, 2017 8:00 am / Leave a comment

In the first two parts of this mini-series, I discussed the definitions of (Part 1) and role of AIS (Part 2) in digitization and digitalization. In this third part, I would like to highlight the development of the role of the accountant in this regard. Digitalization is both boon and bane of the future accountant – on one hand, it helps further the minimizing of his/her involvement in the nitty-gritty daily grind, the “bean-counting” the end of which has long been heralded by the automation of accounting processes. On the other hand, though, it raises questions about the legitimacy of the role – in other words, are accountants still needed? It seems an inevitable development that more digitalization means less and less accountants are needed to perform the same tasks, both in scope and quality. In this highly interesting article published by the WHU in Vallendar/Germany, the authors highlight eight challenges that current and future (management) accountants might face when confronted with the digitalization trend. The video below helps as an executive summary of the article, but I highly recommend to have a good read – you will learn that the digitalization trend does not have to automatically mean the end of the (management) accountant – if they get proactive with the technology and concepts involved.

Mini-series Part 1: Definition of digitization and digitalization

August 1, 2017 8:00 am / Leave a comment

In the next three posts on this blog, I would like to introduce the topic of digitization/digitilization, and the effects on accounting and accountants. If one does a Google or Twitter search about this topic, one finds a variety of articles that indicate its rising importance. In this post, I would like to summarize a few definitions for the terms “digitization” and “digitalization”, largely following the distinctions made in this blog post:

Digitization is the process of creating digital versions of analogue and/or physically represented data. This has per se no business or accounting meaning, but is a necessary part of the digitalization process (see below). The output of digitization can then be used by computers and software for further processing. Archives, for instance, digitize their records to preserve them, make them searchable, and distributable if needed (you can find an example for the US National Archive digitization project here).

Digitalization in turn is the leveraging of digital technologies and digitized information to enable, improve, transform and support businesses, business operations, business processes, decision-making, big data usage, etc.. Digitization is a necessary step in the digitalization process, especially if companies want to reduce (or even eliminate) the dependency and use of physical records (typically on paper). This does not only help improve the business, but also save a considerable amount of costs in paper usage, waste, and archival storage. Where the purpose of digitization is the conversion of records into a digital format, digitalization is geared towards actionable business needs.

Very often, these terms are used synonymous, but in fact, they are not! The difference (or rather complement) between them can be likened to cost and management accounting. There, cost accounting denotes the tools and actions to record, process and output costing data, whereas management accounting adds the purpose of decision-making to the cost accounting toolbox. This entails important implications for accounting information systems, which I will cover in the second part of this mini-series.