Management Control Transformation: Perspectives from the Information Economy?

he changing and dynamic environment influenced by the organisational and competitive patterns of the information economy is increasing the need of transforming the existing management control systems towards increasing visibility, and transparency of new competitive and organisational phenomena. Our analysis is based on Simons¿ model of management control [1995], whereby business strategy gets implemented by means of the interactions among fours levers of control, that is to say: beliefs systems, boundary systems, diagnostic control systems, and interactive control systems. The purpose of the paper is to identify the drivers and to a lesser extent the processes of transformation of management control within the context of the information economy, e.g. a context within which some fundamental rules of business and organisation are altered. The literature so far has identified some drivers of transformation of management control systems and namely the technological level, the structured level, the judgement level, and the programmatic level [Almqvist and Skoog, 2001]. Very little it has been said about the process of transformation [Burns and Scapens, 2000]. The paper tests the theoretical aspects (drivers and processes) of the management control transformation in the context of the information economy. The study is exploratory.