The Institute of Management Accountants has launched a Research Centre of Excellence focused on delivering best practices and tools for practitioners in the management accounting profession who are involved in decision support, planning and control functions.
The vision of the center is to provide relevant and leading edge research and tools that advance the profession and enable financial professionals to be more successful strategic business partners, according to the IMA.
The CoE includes the IMA's Foundation for Applied Research, which has delivered more than 250 practitioner-based research studies over the past decade. Dr. Sandra Richtermeyer, an associate professor at Xavier University and president of FAR, will serve as the senior contributing editor for FAR.
The center is comprised of five research practices with a rotating senior contributing editor. The five research practices of the IMA CoE are:
-- Leadership strategies and ethics, which includes standards and practices around ethical conduct. The first editor is Dr. Curtis Verschoor, CPA, CIA, CMA, CFE, and a research professor at DePaul University.
-- Internal controls and risk management, which includes internal controls frameworks, tools and shared learning for managing regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley Sections 302 and 404, and enterprise risk management approaches. The first editors are William Shenkir, Ph.D., CPA, and Paul Walker, Ph.D., from the University of Virginia.
-- Technology enablers, which include XBRL, data mining, continuous on-line auditing and business activity monitoring. The first editor is Neal Hannon, an instructor at the University of Hartford.
-- Strategic costing, which includes best practices and a framework for evaluating costing processes such as activity-based costing, resource consumption accounting, German cost accounting and other approaches. The first editor is Douglas Clinton, Ph.D., CPA and associate professor at Northern Illinois University.
-- Business performance management, which includes balanced scorecards, customer profitability, budgeting, and target-setting tools and methodologies. The first editor is John Kittredge, managing partner of CEO Performance Inc.
