Investigating how Business Intelligence and Analytics systems reshape the management accounting function’s organizational relevance

Management accountants (MAs) traditionally serve as specialized support for information provision, building relationships with top management, operational managers, and staff functions, including HR and IT. The spread of Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) systems, which collect, organize, and analyze data to support decision-making, has the potential to significantly influence MAs’ work, their interactions with other organizational actors, and, ultimately, their organizational relevance. While prior research has examined how BI&A reshapes MAs’ tasks and competencies, few empirical studies have explored how these technologies reconfigure MAs’ relationships with key stakeholders and how such changes affect the importance and the recognition of the management accounting function. This paper addresses this gap by investigating whether and how BI&A reshapes the management accounting function’s organizational relevance. Drawing on a single in-depth case study of a medium-sized Italian company that has adopted BI&A for decision support purposes since 2020, the study analyzes how MAs’ interactions with operational managers, top management, and the IT function have evolved. Our findings reveal that, rather than diminishing MAs’ importance, BI&A has repositioned them as decision enablers, hybrid figures that bridge the business and technical domains, and strategic partners. These transformations elevate MAs’ recognition and centrality, suggesting that BI&A has the potential to reinforce, rather than erode, the management accounting function’s organizational standing.