Incorporating Information Technology into Accounting and Finance Higher Education Curricula in Greece

Changes in world economy caused by globalization, the requirements for transparent financial information reporting accentuated by the economic crisis and the emergence of ethics and corporate responsibility as a vital integral component of business conduct and of information as a critical resource have posed significant new challenges on accounting and finance professionals. Aiming to address these challenges, the accounting profession looked at Information Technology (IT), which evolves and advances with an ever increasing pace, as a crucial facilitator. Today, modern IT systems enable accountants to have real time access to more and new types of information. New technologies with extraordinary analytical capacity, created a situation where voluminous data can be collected, processed and presented in ways and at times that could not even be imagined in the past. These developments necessitated the extension of the accountants’ role, regarding IT systems, from plain users to managers, designers and evaluators. Consequently, IT became one of the core required skills of modern accounting and finance professionals. This had to be mapped onto the accounting and finance higher education curricula, whose IT content has been constantly under a close inspection and revision by educators, professionals and national and international accounting bodies, over the past years. However, despite the fact that several attempts have been reported to develop a standard, the current situation shows that there are plenty of diverse approaches to incorporate IT into accounting and finance curricula and that we are far from reaching a widely accepted consensus. The present study presents a charting of the IT content of accounting and finance curricula offered in Greek higher education institutes, as part of a research project aiming to investigate the compliance of Greek curricula with the emerging trends in Accounting & Finance Education. Information about the curricula was drawn from the websites of all the accounting and/or finance departments of Greek higher education institutes.