The Information Systems-Accounting Nexus: Lessons from an Australian Institution

The bursting of the dot com bubble in March 2000 caused firms to be wary about investment in, and the use of, information technologies. Consequently, demand in technology-related jobs dropped significantly. This drop in demand has had a profound negative impact on the demand for information systems (IS) courses in the tertiary education sector. Some IS departments suffered badly, and some were forced to downsize their faculty through attrition, giving back faculty lines, freezing hiring, or releasing faculty. At the same time, there has been significant and sustained growth in demand for accounting programs. Professional accounting bodies have introduced technologies to accountants and auditors, and technologies have gained its significance in the accounting discipline. With such an observation, this paper explores whether accounting students see IS courses as a complement to their program and the chance to offer IS-related courses to accounting students. We administrated a survey to explore accounting students' preferences for accounting-related disciplines. We then conducted a number of focus groups to gain an understanding of their expectations and interest in technology-related courses. We found that although accounting students preferred finance courses to IS courses, they were interested in IS and considered IS to be useful to their long-term career. We then proposed several IS courses customized for accounting students. This will open up more teaching opportunities for IS academics, and strengthens the IS programs by providing stability in an otherwise unstable environment. After the rationale for a list of proposed IS-related courses for accounting students, we discussed some issues that IS academics should pay attention to before launching these courses.