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25. March 2019 : Journal paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change

The journal paper "The role of business analytics in the controllers’ and management accountants’ competence profiles: An exploratory study on individual level data" by Thuy Duong Oesterreich and Frank Teuteberg has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change.

In recent years, the rise of big data has led to an obvious shift in the competence profile expected from the controller and management accountant (MA). Among others, business analytics competences and IT skills are considered a “must have” capability for the controlling and MA profession. The main purpose of this study is to examine the supply of business analytics competences in the current competence profiles of controlling professionals in an attempt to answer the question whether or not a skills gap exists.

Based on a set of 2,331 member profiles of German controlling professionals extracted from the business social network XING, a text analytics approach is conducted to discover patterns out of the semi-structured data. Apart from the mediating role of gender, company size and other variables, the results indicate that the current competence profiles of the controller do not comply with the recent requirements toward business analytics competences. Guided by the resource-based view of the firm, organizational theory as well as social cognitive theory, an explanatory model is developed that helps to explain the apparent skills gap and thus to enhance the understanding toward the rationales behind the observed findings.

The journal is currently classified as a B-rated journal according to the VHB Jourqual3 ranking.