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A Maturity Model for Management Control Systems

Five Evolutionary Steps to Guide Development

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Abstract

Corporate management in today’s international companies has become increasingly complex. To cope with the growing challenges, information technology (IT)-based management control systems (MCSs) covering reporting, planning, and consolidation have been deployed. Despite their tradition in management research, the ‘right’ setup of MCSs is still challenging. Maturity models (MMs) are an established instrument to identify strengths and weaknesses of certain domains. As existing MMs rather focus on single MCS domains, neglect an IT perspective and miss a sound methodical foundation, this paper outlines an empirically and algorithmically constructed MCS MM. The model consists of three partial MMs for reporting, planning, and consolidation, which are integrated into one holistic MCS MM. The five levels of the MCS MM guide MCS evolution from a basic, mandatory/external-driven MCS (level 1) to a balanced MCS (level 2), and a comprehensive MCS (level 3). Ultimately, MCSs show a strong strategic focus (level 4) and leverage the potentials of modern IT (level 5).

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  1. Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen, Müller-Friedberg-Strasse 8, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Frederik Marx,  Felix Wortmann &  Jörg H. Mayer

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  1. Frederik Marx
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  2. Felix Wortmann
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  3. Jörg H. Mayer
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Correspondence to Felix Wortmann.

Additional information

Accepted after three revisions by Prof. Dr. Buhl.

This article is also available in German in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: F Marx, F Wortmann, JH Mayer (2012) Ein Reifegradmodell für Unternehmenssteuerungssysteme. Fünf Reifegrade als Grundlage der systematischen Entwicklung. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-012-0325-3.

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Marx, F., Wortmann, F. & Mayer, J.H. A Maturity Model for Management Control Systems. Bus Inf Syst Eng 4, 193–207 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-012-0220-x

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