Abstract. The activities of the MNO (Mobile NetworkOperator

During the years of Lithuanian economic independence, much emphasis is laid on financial accounting and auditing, whereas management accounting has been languishing in the background.This paper investigates the role and development of management accounting and the usefulness of its information perceived by managers. The management accounting system is characterized in terms of information. These characteristics are: scope, timeliness, the level of aggregation, and information which assists integration.Empirical support for the relationship between the features of management information and its perceived usefulness is provided using data gathered from questionnaires and interviews. The search for usefulness of management accounting information was guided by the accounting research literature. The goal has been to determine what features of information are recognized by managers and accountants as useful.The results of analysis have shown that all interviewed managers perceived management accounting (economic and non-economic) information as useful. However, the level of their scores has been higher than that of accountants.There had been no comprehensive study involving the evaluation of usefulness of accounting information by Lithuanian managers. The present study has been undertaken to learn more about how Lithuanian managers perceive the usefulness of management accounting information. This was the principal objective of this research. Since managers’satisfaction with the accounting system could be highly biased, the next objective was to determine whether accountants perceived the same features of information as useful. The third objective of this study was to review the possibilities for the development of management accounting systems.Thus, the purpose of this paper was to examine the perception of usefulness of accounting information by its suppliers and users.The paper proceeds as follows. We describe management accounting, its role and development. We provide a framework for the survey based on a review of the extensive literature on research published by foreign management accounting journals during the period 1980-2005, including Accounting, Organizations and Society. The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Management Accounting Research, Strategic Finance, Business and Finance History. Cost Accounting Magazine, Management Accounting Quarterly. A survey and its statistical analysis are presented. The final section contains conclusions.

The primary interest of the research presented in this paper lies in the area of complex information needs. A study of awareness of complex information needs and their features has been undertaken to gain insight into the user side of user-IT relation in meeting complex information needs in business. The research has used a survey of Lithuanian business middle-to-senior managers to elicit their responses on the issues of features of complex information needs and environment monitoring. The respondents confirmed the heterogeneous nature of complex information needs and pointed out the most important groups of information monitored on a permanent basis, the top three being competition and market information, accounting and financial information, and customer information. The analysis of monitored information in the terms of information monitored together has disclosed some patterns that might be useful in providing an integrated view of activity environment and assisting in possible emergence of complex information needs.

Despite the advances in IT, information systems intended for management informing did not uniformly fulfil the increased expectations of users; this can be said mostly about complex information needs. Although some of the technologies for supporting complicated insights, like management decision support systems and technologies, experienced reduction in interest both from researchers and practitioners, this did not reduce the importance of well-supported business informing and decision making. Being attributed to the group of intelligent systems and technologies, decision support (DS) technologies have been largely supplemented by business intelligence (BI) technologies. Both types of technologies are supported by respective information technologies, which often appear to be quite closely related. The objective of this paper is to define relations between simple and complex informing intended to satisfy different sets of needs and provided by different sets of support tools. The paper attempts to put together decision support and business intelligence technologies, based on common goals of sense-making and use of advanced analytical tools. A model of two interconnected cycles has been developed to relate the activities of decision support and business intelligence. Empirical data from earlier research is used to direct possible further insights into this area

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