The role of accounting is often stated to be providing information for decision making.  Management accounting, however, fulfills a much broader role in organizations. In addition to providing a framework for planning, management accounting has an important role in management control.

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Management Accounting in the Digital Era

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As businesses seek to benefit from the current digital transformation taking place across sectors, capturing, classifying and analyzing big data is at the heart of these new approaches. Senior managers are realizing that a successful transition to becoming data-driven can only be achieved with quality data.  That requires a high level of data governance.

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The Governance Challenge

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As the volume, variety, and velocity of available data continues to grow at the rates indicated, businesses face two urgent challenges: how to identify actionable insights within this data (data mining and data analytics)? And how to protect it?  Both challenges depend on a high level of data management and data protection – together “data governance”. We can think of data governance as a combination of both the IT and the business aspects of a firm.

 

Implementing data governance requires establishing rules and policies within organizations from a high strategic level to a detailed operational and process level. A data governance policy can help organizations improve their overall performance as well as reduce risks.

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Management Accountants to Harness Data Governance

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I am much honored to be the lecturer of ICMA Hong Kong Office for the past years teaching the advance subjects of Strategic Cost Management and Strategic Business Analysis. The former topic introduces the concept of management control and set the role of management accounting in management control together with issues in the design of management accounting systems, the types of control, and most important, how the various levels of control can be integrated; the latter topic provides specialization-level knowledge to accountants and financially motivated general managers in the interface areas between accounting and the other business functions. To enable one to manage the operation of an organization with a healthy constructive prospect relies heavily on the input of data, the governance of data, and the control of data, all fall into the knowledge and skills of management accounting which are of paramount importance in order to achieve success in the 21st century business world.