The Bias About the Future of Accounting

There is a strong bias in the accounting and consulting profession to a status quo – we will continue to do things pretty much as we do today. We understand that technology is changing the world and that there is a huge disruption in various industries and professions – except ours.

In the Richard and Daniel Susskind book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, they state that "Technical myopia [is the] tendency to underestimate the potential of tomorrow’s applications by evaluating them in terms of today’s enabling technologies...” For example, we tend to think that because technology hasn’t succeeded yet with speech recognition or artificial intelligence, it never will.

So, what does this mean for the future of accounting?

Stop Being an Ostrich

Should we really be putting our heads in the sand and thinking that we will not have to change and adapt? With the rapid advances in technology and the economic pressures, do we truly think that major changes are not coming into our own backyard? Many of us still use timesheets to determine the value of a project when the research clearly shows that this is not the value that our customers want or use.

We still perform many tasks the same old way (after the fact) when clearly technology allows us to be way more proactive with our customers. We don’t think that the new analytical tools included in the new accounting and management systems available to customers to give them accurate and timely advice will affect us.

Avoid Irrelevancy

There is an old saying that, “Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you're standing still.” Let’s not get run over (except maybe by a computer) and move forward instead. The status quo is not an option anymore. If we continue to work in the old ways, we may become irrelevant and I, for one, really don’t want to be irrelevant.

There is an excellent conference being offered this fall by the Strategic Leadership Association called “Fall 2016 Retreat – The Post-Professional Society” which could be very enlightening about our future and the changes coming.