In NVivo Veritas: How Information Systems Increase the Flexibility and Relevance of Strategic Management Accounting

One of the key tasks for strategic management accountants is to estimate the size of the market in which their firm operates. For such an estimation to be correct, strategic management accountants need to have access to private information from the firm’s competitors. Such access is impossible since no competitor is willing to share internal documents, resulting in a problem of imperfect information. This problem hinders strategic management accountants’ efforts to perform their main tasks, forcing them to just approximate the size of their firms’ markets. In this paper we show how, by applying text analysis techniques to publicly available documents from their firm’s competitors, strategic management accountants can significantly increase the accuracy of their forecasts. This increased accuracy implies that the use of techniques from the Information Systems (IS) field can help mitigating the thus far unsolvable problem of imperfect information from which the strategic management accounting field has traditionally suffered.