Dissertation: Strategic Changes in Finnish Basic Industry – Extensive Expertise and Foresight Skills Required from Management Accounting
Salla-Tuulia Siivonen’s dissertation in the field of Accounting and Finance suggests that strategic changes in basic industry enterprises are posing new challenges for their accounting departments. Accounting departments are now expected to produce calculations and forecasts that provide additional value.
In her dissertation in the field of Accounting and Finance, Salla-Tuulia Siivonen, Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration, suggests that Finnish basic production enterprises have become more specialised, moving away cost management.
‒ Heavy industries have, for example, taken new initiatives to invest in biotechnology as a means to produce new products, Siivonen says.
Siivonen’s dissertation suggests that when enterprises become more and more specialised, these strategic changes increase their need for foresight. Heavy industry enterprises are trying to generate new revenue streams to complement their main production. This increases the demand for the development of new calculations that bring additional value.
‒ Strategic decisions are often based on calculations made outside the traditional accounting departments, for example by production or by management. These calculations are often made without traditional accounting information systems, using, for example, spreadsheets instead. This changes the traditional notion of control and budgeting responsibility as something that only belongs to the accounting department of an enterprise, Siivonen explains.
Specialisation and new calculation methods require the enterprises’ CFOs and controllers to thoroughly understand the enterprise’s business.
‒ Controllers interact with employees from other departments more and more. In other words, they need better interpersonal and teamwork skills than before. The new, broader expectations set for this group of professionals is, in turn, posing new challenges for the education offered in higher education institutions.
***
Salla-Tuulia Siivonen defends her doctoral dissertation in Accounting and Finance entitled ”Holding all the cards" The associations between management accounting, strategy and strategic change on the 16th of May, 2014.
Opponent: Petri Järvenpää (Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics)
Custodian: Markus Granlund