Impact of ICT Innovative Momentum on Real-Time Accounting

Background: Enterprises are entering into the era of the real-time economy, also called the "now economy", which can be characterized by a substantive acceleration of business measurement, assessment and decision processes. The real-time reporting, as a phenomenon of the now economy, presents a new challenge to the Accounting Information Systems. The current long wave of prosperity is characterized by an innovative momentum of ICT, with several disruptive innovations, far from being completely utilized. Objectives: Possible future potentialities and consequences of this innovative momentum of ICT on the real-time reporting are analysed within a network scenario approach. Methods/Approach: The used approach is the Futures Wheel, a structured brainstorming method that structures ideas about future events, issues, trends, and strategy, organised under several layers of rings of consequences. Results: The innovative momentum has certain visible direct consequences such as smart mobile devices, higher business intelligence, improved enterprise architecture and enterprise application integration, cloud services offer or increased business process maturity in organizations, and a significant number of indirect consequences on the real-time accounting. Conclusions: The actual innovative momentum of ICT has a vast set of indirect opportunities for the real-time reporting which, after a proper plan, can address its implementation.