Klaus Möller

Digitalization has the potential to disrupt the management accounting domain. It may not only affect the digital landscape of the organization and the associated business models, but also management accounting and control practices as well as the role of the controller. This editorial discusses these developments by introducing the concept of digitalization and describing its impact on the field of management accounting and control. Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities—the process of moving to a digital business (Gartner, 2020). As such, it has affected all kinds of business activities, including business models and supply chains, as well as support functions such as human resources and accounting. Digitalization enables various new forms of cooperation between companies, suppliers, customers, and employees, leading to new product and service offerings. At the same time, digitalization is a challenge for incumbent companies, as it requires them to reflect on their current strategy and to explore new business opportunities. In the finance function, digitalization has resulted in the automation and robotization of routine processes, the introduction of business intelligence, and the application of data analytics. Digitalization is affecting our daily lives as well as the role of controllers.

Technology companies are leading the pack in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other industries are taking advantage of AI to streamline processes and increase competitive advantage. On the way to implementing AI, organizations face ethical and organizational obstacles, which this study identifies through a structured literature review. It identifies six general ethical barriers to AI adoption, i.e., human well-being, trust, fairness, transparency, oversight & regulation, and accountability and four organizational barriers, i.e., resources, governance, culture, and employee intention to use AI. The study then examines two AI organizational governance frameworks and discusses how they might be useful in overcoming the barriers.

In an age of increasing access to and power of artificial intelligence (AI), ethical concerns, such as fairness, transparency, and human well-being have come to the attention of regulators, standard setting bodies, and organizations alike. In order to build AI-based systems that comply with new rules, organizations will have to adopt systems of governance. This study develops, based on existing frameworks and a multiple case study, a governance framework specifically designed with these challenges in mind: The St. Gallen Governance Framework for Artificial Intelligence focuses on identifying stakeholder concerns and strategic goals, building a management control system, assigning roles and responsibilities, and incorporating dynamism into the system of governance.

We present a state of the art analysis on input and output factors for services in the field of telemedicine by applying a systematic literature review. Our results show that no attempts for the systematic identification of a set of input and output factors have been conducted so far, and the systematic consideration of all stakeholders is not adequately addressed in literature. We further identified and present input and output factors that we assigned to 16 categories and assessed their relevance for the stakeholders of the telemedicine sector. Our study hence contributes to research activities within service productivity and can serve as a starting point to develop comprehensive productivity models for telemedical services (TMS).