The Data Scientist: A Cuckoo in the Management Accountant's Nest?

Sammanfattning: 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. We find a strong overlap of tasks between data scientists and management accountants, including e.g. performance measurement and business partnering tasks. Despite a versatile interaction pattern between both focus professionals, data scientists proactively use the strong role ambiguity to expand their tasks as well as organizational status through role making and distance themselves from 'dirty work'. The main means applied in this context are the execution of expectation management, a monopoly on sophisticated Business Intelligence & Analytics systems and a strong top management support. Thus, we argue for an even stronger decoupling between management accountants and Management Accounting tasks than in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) era. In contrast to authors, such as Quattrone (2016), we provide empirical evidence that management accountants are not able to retain their organizational position by taking on an interrogation role within the 'digital revolution'.