Special section on management control and new information technologies

The pace of development in information technology (IT) during the last ten years has been staggering. The use of information technology to support business processes has increased dramatically with the advent of electronic communication technologies, Internet, Intranet, browsers and database technology. All of these have extended the enterprise and have allowed the firm to be in touch with its business activities and customers through its integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, e-commerce applications and in many situations interorganizational information-sharing mechanisms. It has been suggested that new technologies such as ERP systems make it possible to model the details of the firm’s operations in computer technology and make a highly integrated mode of management possible (Davenport, 1998). The prospect of an intense mapping of organizational processes in computer representations is there, and therefore the management of the firm can be made real time. Such prospects are not without critique, however. It may be overly optimistic both for technological reasons since new technology is not always simple and able to communicate with its parts (Moschella, 1997), and for application reasons since it is often loosely coupled to the firm’s management control issues (see e.g. Granlund and Malmi, 2002). In a sense, the irony is that many of the problems facing the use of information technology today are not so dissimilar from the problems that arose in the 1970s, when the first generation of accounting