The Data Scientist. A cuckoo in the Management Accountant's nest?

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 5,0, Stockholm School of Economics, language: English, abstract: Data Science has been one of the most used buzzwords on corporate agendas in recent years and with it, a new professional, the data scientist, has entered the organizational stage. Surprisingly, Management Accounting literature has not investigated the role of data scientists and their interactions with management accountants so far. Via a qualitative case study, we strive to establish a more nuanced and clearer understanding of the concrete tasks carried out by these organizational players and shed light on the interactions with management accountants.

In this paper, chapter 2 presents MA frameworks that combine both the IIS and the MA domains. We further give an overview of tasks that have been historically attributed to management accountants. Subsequently, these tasks are contrasted to those ascribed to the new professional actor, i.e. the data scientist. In this context, we present the research questions of this paper, that aim at closing significant research gaps in this area. Afterwards, method theories are introduced that enable the creation of a theoretical framework. Within chapter 3, the research method and case background are presented, so that the research questions can be analyzed in chapter 4 and, afterwards, discussed in chapter 5. Moreover, in this section a general outlook for the MA domain is given. Finally, the limitations of this study are stated and suggestions for further research are presented in chapter 6.