On Management Accounting

The Wikipedia defines management accounting as:

"....concerned with the provisions and use of accounting information to managers within organizations, to provide them with the basis to make informed business decisions that will allow them to be better equipped in their management and control functions."

With the developments in operations management, optimisation, and information systems, the above definition makes management accounting little more than a clerical function: just "providing" information to management who make "informed business decisions". Since the providing is facilitated by information systems, and the informedf decision making is the management's business, management accountants become like the Maytag repairmen.

Just as financial accountants outsourced much of accounting information systems, the management accountants since the 1960s outsourced much of their work to a whole host of fields that emerged since the 1980s: cost engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_engineering), quantity surveying (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_surveyor), industrial engineers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering), project management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management), operations management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management) and so on. The management accounting curriculum today does not provide any value adding skills in practice.  If I were running a business, the management accounting graduates would be the last persons I would consider hiring. Depending on the needs, one of the above would be the suitable candidates.

The wikipedia definition makes management accounting a very passive discipline if it is at all a discipline. Much of the developments in management accounting research the past 30 years or so has had to do a lot more "management" than management accounting. 

Much of what is taught in management accounting courses has little relation to what is needed in industry, and unless the curriculum is revamped to reclaim much of the territory that was lost while we fiddled management accounting is sure soon to become a moribund field of study.. But that requires reintroduction of all the analytical tools that disappeared from the business school curriculum the past 30 years or so.