Future Studies in Management Accounting from the Perspective of Science and Information Technology

If companies want to compete and succeed in today’s highly competitive and fast changing world, they need correct, precise, relevant, and reliable information to make correct decisions. Management accountants, as one of the most important providers of the information needed by managers, need to adapt themselves to development and changes of the environment. It terms of data collection method, it was a descriptive-survey one, and considering the type of data, it was a mixed one. In the present research, the driving forces of management accounting in terms of science and information technology were identified in the next 20 years. To identity the main driving forces, the panel of experts, open questionnaires, interviews, and phase Delphi in 2016-2017 were used. In order to select experts from Iranian university professors and experts, the method of sampling used was judgment sampling and snowball sampling and it continued up to theoretical saturation. The results indicated that management accounting does not have a suitable and high status and needs careful attention. Based on experts’ views, developing software and intelligent accounting systems are the most important requirements of management accounting, implying that in the future, accounting systems tend to be influenced by technology and made intelligent. Intelligent business was ranked the second driving force and both developing the use of personal technologies and cloud computing were equally ranked the third. It is suggested that influential agents of the profession embark on careful and long-term planning to promote and develop the profession in the future.