Technology Enablement - Relevance for Management Accountants
By Jeff Thomson
IMA Vice President – Research and Practice Development

Technology Enablement is one of the IMA’s five research practices in its recently formed Research CoE (Center of Excellence). The Research Center of Excellence is designed to provide practitioners with best practice guidance, tools and training (in partnership with the Professional Development team) which enable them to be more effective strategic business partners.

Sounds good, but what does this mean in practice? Simply put, the key word in “Technology Enablement” is not Technology, it is actually Enablement. Think of all the challenges facing you as a management accountant. The need for a faster book close. The need for better operational detail to enable more complete and actionable budget or outlook variance analyses. The need for more leading indicators to balance the preponderance of lagging indicators in forecasts and in business plans. And of course, dealing with the staggering costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance whose bill to shareholders has now reached $35 B (yes, that’s billions) – in addition, market studies clearly indicate that organizations of all sizes have had to delay innovations and investments in technology just to “get through” the compliance jungle. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

The IMA’s role is to identify current and emerging technologies which Enable you as a management accounting professional to successfully deal with these and other challenges. Here are just a few examples. The IMA is focused on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) because of its potential to improve enterprise business reporting from several perspectives – accuracy, speed and value. The focus is on what XBRL as a web-based open standard can deliver for practitioners whose day-to-day responsibilities include producing and analyzing internal “information” for upper management. This information includes financial and non-financial value drivers. Streamlining the information flow from multiple databases should allow for more time spent on converting raw information into intelligence and insights for upper management. Emphasis on practical case studies (rather than theoretical discussions) allows the practitioner to assess the value and portability of the application to their environment. In the case of XBRL, we are working with the FDIC to articulate how they are in the process of using technology enablement to streamline and fundamentally transform the data flow from over 8500 member banks. This topic is the subject of an IMA sponsored webinar and an article in Strategic Finance magazine.

There are many other areas of emphasis for the IMA in the area of Technology Enablement that we believe are of great value to management accountants. These include business intelligence, data mining, continuous monitoring/online auditing and advanced business process documentation techniques. What do you think? What are some of your “pain points” in terms of real-world applications issues requiring technology enablement? The “voice of the member” is very important to us – get engaged and give us your thoughts by signing up for the technology enablement listserv and network with your peers! The management accountant must be in a position to drive technology enablement based on applications needs, not be a “victim” of IT solutions that do not fit the need. Partner with your IT team and take charge!