The Management Accounting Department's Data Scientists: The Intermediary in the Business Analytics Network

Abstract: Business analytics involves tooling, statistics, and mathematics for decision-making and reporting in the data-driven business era. It is an interdisciplinary phenomenon in which management accountants work together with data professionals. Management accountants must engage with business analytics to maintain their legitimacy in the data-driven business era. Therefore, this thesis aims to study how management accountants engage with business analytics and what role data professionals play in this process. A single case study was carried out at TechCo, a Swedish software technology company. The analysis found that management accountants engage with business analytics through a network of different actors. The thesis's main contribution to the interdisciplinary business analytics domain highlights the critical role that data scientists can play in bridging weak links in the business analytics network between management accountants, data engineers, and a data warehouse. The results have practical implications for creating data science teams to support management accountants with business analytics.