Peter F. Drucker

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 593.

Management Challenges for the 21^st Century

HarperBusiness, 1999, p. 99

But for none of these top management tasks* does the traditional accounting system provide information. Indeed, none of these tasks is even compatible with the assumptions of the traditional accounting model. The new information technology, based on the computer, had no choice but to depend on the accounting system's data. No others were available. It collected these data, systematized them, manipulated them, analyzed them and presented them. On this rested, in large measure, the tremendous impact the new technology had on what cost accounting data were designed for: operations. But it also explains information technology's near-zero impact on the management of business itself.

Top management's frustration with the data that information technology has so far provided has triggeredthe new, the next, Information Revolution. Information technologists, especially chief information officers in business, soon realized that the accounting data are not what their associates need […]. But they did not, as a rule, realize that what was needed was not more data, more technology, more speed. What was needed was to define information; what was needed was new concepts. And in one enterprise after another, top management people during the last few years have begun to ask, “What information concepts do we need for our tasks?” And they have now begun to demand them of their traditional information providers, the accounting people.

* that is, risk-taking, strategic decisions