Visualizing value creation through the management control of intangibles

Abstract

Management control systems may differ markedly from organization to organization. However, the trend within many of today's organizations is to include new perspectives in their formal management control and accounting systems. This ongoing transformation of management control systems is partly driven by the notion that intangibles play an increasingly important role in an organization's value creation process and thereby has to be visualized to a greater extent than hitherto. Nowadays, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders are frequently incorporated into the value creation process of organizations. Together with the growing importance of other intangible resources, such as leadership, employee competence and internal business processes, this approach promotes a highly complex picture of the organizational value creation process. The aim of this paper is to analyze organizational value creation from a management control perspective and, based on a longitudinal case study of a Swedish bank, discuss possible key features of a management control system that enables organizations to understand and allocate attention to the value creation of the firm.