Looking for Synergies between Accounting and Information Technologies

During the latest years, ICT provided new opportunities for companies through Internet, digital technologies, the convergence between several media tools (audio, video, and so on), the development of some social utilities, such as wiki, chat, forum, instant messages, tweets, and social networks. These innovations required additional research efforts, also in the field of financial, management and strategic accounting, because companies need to discover if, how and where these new technologies can be applied. Additional investigations are required to understand how companies can employ integration and convergence between several ICT tools in order to enhance their ability of managing information, of taking better decisions, of improving organizational control and coordination, of being proactive and value adding. The leitmotif of this book is that these innovations require the shift of the focus from integration to synergy between accounting and ICT. Companies, and their managers, need to understand these new technologies and create an environment, in which ICT cooperate with the other components of accounting information system, in order to strength companies’ ability to guide activities towards objectives.