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One technology frequently mentioned in this context is cloud-based computing (Becker & Heinzelmann, 2017 Bhimani & Willcocks, 2014 Yau-Yeung et al., 2020). Regarding public administration, researchers and practitioners have articulated a new paradigm of “digital government,” which promises more integrated, agile, and holistic public sector organizations (Andrews, 2019 Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). Coping with an inflexible cloud-based system may therefore add to the list of challenges that public sector management accountants experience when trying to be(come) business partners.ĭigitalization increasingly permeates the private and public sectors, affecting all types of organizations and their practices (Hodges & Grubnic, 2010 Jeacle, 2021 Kinder, 2010 Moll & Yigitbasioglu, 2019). Given this, cloud technology constitutes a risk that accounting and control processes become unduly inflexible and cumbersome at the local level. Although local management accountants framed it as a tool that should enable them to draw on their local expertise to produce tailor-made information for their local units, central management accountants saw the CERP system as a tool that allowed them to consume prefabricated “high-quality” information to assure efficient and risk-free accounting processes throughout the entire organization. Looking at the different attitudes that central and local management accountants developed toward the CERP system, we found that although both focal groups in our analysis belonged to the same occupation, they framed the role of technology differently. However, the less flexible features of a CERP system provided by external vendors, such as limited customization, posed a challenge for the local management accountants serving the different needs of a diverse range of managers and business units.
#FACE OF GOVERNMENT VS BEANCOUNTER MANUAL#
Our findings suggest that the CERP system enabled central management accountants to mobilize their specific expertise because it eliminated manual work, increased transparency, and made them feel more comfortable with the numbers. Based on a case study of a large Swedish local government municipality, we explored the extent to which a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (CERP) system enabled the role performance of public sector management accountants.