On Target | JAMAR | Volume

PRESIDENTS MESSAGE 2006: 10 years and Counting!

PRESIDENTS MESSAGE 2006: 10 years and Counting!

The Institute was incorporated under the Associations Act of Victoria in 1996. This year it is effectively 10-years old. Over the last 10 years there has been significant progress on some fronts, and more work to be done in others. Let us first consider our achievements by summarizing what we have achieved over the last 10 years:

·            Internationally recognized post nominal, the CMA    

·            Degree qualified membership (most at Master level)  

·            Postgraduate professional development program        

·            Australian and overseas universities running the CMA post graduate programs in their Masters Degree programs.

·            University credits for CMA subjects

·            Prestigious Academic journal, JAMAR.

·            Professional and academic acceptance of qualification

·            A ‘World-Class’ reference Library in Management Accounting

·            Worldwide distribution network of our education program, including China, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Dubai, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Canada and the European Union.

CMA House has been fully operational now for 2-years, and most secretarial matters now handled at this address. Within this, the ICMA houses its Reference Library, in which one of the most comprehensive collections of management accounting books and journals in Australia. Members are welcome to use its reference library, by appointment.

Our web page, cmawebline.org was completely updated this year, and attracts significant interest from around the world especially its Newsletter, On Target, and the online journal, The Journal of Applied Management Accounting Research (JAMAR). JAMAR attracts research publications from many parts of the world. The journal is available in both print and electronic form, and members are encouraged to submit papers that will be then appropriately refereed to ensure that adequate academic and professional standards are maintained I wish to thank the Editors and the international panel of referees for their work in assisting us to create this excellent resource that has become an important tool in our public profile.

Membership continues to grow healthily both in Australia and overseas, now mainly due to our Education programs. It is always difficult picking exact numbers at this initial point in the financial year because of the uncertainty surrounding renewals. It would appear, however, that our current membership is now over 1,200 CMAs a good benchmark target to have achieved in our 10^th year of existence!

Of course there have been the “lows” over the last 10 years. The lowest point was the mutual termination of the merger talks between the ICMA and the Institute of Management Accountants (USA). At the last AGM (2005) our members overwhelmingly passed a resolution to merge on the understanding that “…that existing membership statuses are appropriately preserved on transfer of membership to the merged entity”.

However, it appeared that this initial understanding between the ICMA and IMA was premature. The IMA did not agree to preserving existing membership statuses on the transfer of membership to the merged entity. Further, the ICMA did not agree to having only the IMA’s CMA Education program available for potential members, which it evaluated as being of an undergraduate level vis-à-vis ICMA’s postgraduate level CMA program.

Although in 2005 saw the ICMA was appointed by the Australian Government authorities as a Registered Training Organisation, enabling it to offer an Advanced Diploma in Accounting (Associate Degree) in Australia and overseas, it was decided in 2006 that the costs involved in the audit processes of continuing as a RTO did not warrant the maintenance of that status. Instead the ICMA has formed a strategic alliance with another private RTO to validate the Advanced Diploma in Accounting which it continues to offer.

Your Executive committee also grappled with issues of particular relevance to ‘generalist’ accounting bodies, and considered its relevance for a specialist management accounting body. One issue was if to obtain Australian Government recognition for migration purposes. Currently the generalist accounting bodies in Australia have this recognition. Some members of your executive were in favour of seeking this recognition as they felt it would enhance the profile of the Institute, whilst others opposed it claiming that the ICMA was set up as a specialist postgraduate body set up to further the cause of management accounting and not as a migration body for accounting seeking employment in Australia. Discussions on this issue are heated and continuing. The second issue is if ICMA should seek IFAC membership. Preliminary discussions with IFAC have highlighted two concerns. First, IFAC appears to deal mostly with financial accounting issues (such as IFRS) and has paid only ‘lip-service’ to date on management accounting issues. Second, IFAC charges a differential membership rate depending on the country of origin and its economic standing. As the ICMA is an Australian body, the membership fees of IFAC when averaged over the ICMA’s exclusive but small membership base, would add another A$50 to the membership fees just to support its IFAC membership. Again, the Executive committee is divided on the cost-benefit of IFAC membership.

The ICMA has joined as a founder and sponsoring member of IMAC^TM (the International Management Accounting Collaborative^TM) a senior academic research collaboration spanning many countries. Through IMAC^TM, the ICMA will sponsor management accounting research that will benefit the profession, especially its 5-Star Reporting^TM initiative, incorporating Economic, Environmental, Social, Governance and Empowerment aspects of corporate reporting. The ICMA is also actively lobbying Government appointed Regulatory Bodies to legislate as mandatory (or at least recommended as best-practice) the various audits required to ensure the veracity of such reports, via Strategic Audits, Cost Audits, Environmental Impact Audits and Risk Audits.

Whilst the merger discussions dominated the discussions of our Executive in the last year, the ongoing activities of the Education, Membership and Finance committees continued. The Institute has strong and very active Branches now in the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. New programs started in 2006 in Dubai and Canada. Arrangements are being made to conduct the program in the USA, which has a large pipeline of postgraduate level CFOs to whom the CMA program is designed. Malaysia was brought back to the fold with the program running in Multimedia College. We continue to have setbacks in Hong Kong and Singapore with both the new strategic alliance formed in the last financial year underperforming. As usual, China continues to be elusive, and the Institute in still to appoint a reliable partner there. We have long learnt that patience in China is a virtue!

The Global Business School initiative in which CMA subjects are incorporated within MBA programs of the Royal Roads University (Canada), Educatis University (Switzerland) and the Indonesian Institute of Management is now offered both online and via face-to-face teaching modes.

Once more I must express my deep gratitude to a hard working executive and council. It is unfair to single out individuals but I am sure my colleagues will agree that the input of our Education and Membership Committee Chairmen, and our Treasurer, has been remarkable and well beyond the call of duty.  The ICMA also appointed a Deputy Executive Director, Mr. Chintan Bharwada who is responsible to migrating the Institute’s records to an electronic format, using the Netsuite integrarted CRM and accounting package. I would also like to thank our Secretary John Ortner, Sandy Stewart, our Newsletter Editor, Bill Richardson our Bookshelf and Book Review Editor and Dr Themin Suwardy, our webmaster, for their dedication and professionalism brought to the tasks entrusted to them.

Finally a vote of thanks to our auditor Ben Kaplan who has once again given his time to discharge his duties very professionally.

Leon Duval

President

BOOKSHELF

Senior management is often the focus of management writers.  (Why is it convention to put ‘senior’ management at ‘the top’ when many of us might feel that they get under our feet or in the way?).  One article recently has considered the response of subordinate managers to a top-down change process in a privatised British utility.  In “Managing change: Steering a course between intended strategies and unintended outcomes” in Long Range Planning (Vol. 39, 2006, also at www.lrpjournal.com), Julia Balogun dismisses as “not helpful” the view that change programs fail because of resistance.  She argues that the success of the change program was not due to top management control of the process but the way that subordinates “made sense” of the changes through informal processes.

Also about top management is a recently published book from Harvard Business School Press: Leadership Can Be Taught: A bold approach for a complex world by Sharon Daloz Parks.  While this book aims to show how irrelevant “command-and-control” approaches are no longer relevant in a complex world, the book also gives those interested in teaching something to think about.  This is because Daloz Parks describes the teaching methods and goals of a course taught at Harvard, in particular the pedagogy and its effectiveness from both the teachers’ and students’ perspectives.  The pedagogy extends, for example, to encouraging students to consider their own failures to help them learn about the difficulties of leadership.

This book is essential reading for those academics who forget about the importance of pedagogy in helping students to learn.  So often the response by academics to pressure from professional bodies to improve skills such as communication and written skills is “we need another year in our program”.  Academics must consider their pedagogy more professionally because it is through the pedagogy that they adopt – especially the behaviours that academics model – that students learn.  But then teaching at a university level is too often regarded as something that anybody can do, but you need a PhD to get the job!

Bill Richardson