How to Bridge the Gaps in Finance and Accounting

• Author: Tom Pryor,Michael Cipriano
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22213
• Date: 01 November 2016

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© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22213

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MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

“An ongoing assessment of our effectiveness at serving the corporate

world of accounting and finance”

How to Bridge the Gaps in

Finance and Accounting

Tom Pryor and Michael Cipriano

Over the past six months,

the journal’s editor-

in-chief, Jim Edwards,

has challenged us—members

of his Editorial Advisory

Board—to examine what we

ought to be doing within the

pages of the Journal of Cor-

porate Accounting and Finance

(JCAF), our classrooms, our

academic departments and our

corporations to improve the

accounting and finance profes-

sion, including the academic,

corporate, and government

sectors. That task on its face

is, at a minimum, intimidating

due to the depth and breadth

of analysis required to tackle

it. In a series of columns, we

cannot promise to deliver all of

the answers necessary to meet

Jim’s challenge. What we can

do, however, is to both ask the

questions that we feel need to

be answered by the entire JCAF

readership in order to both

identify the gaps between that

which we are doing versus that

which we ought to be doing and

search for bridges we can build

to fill in those gaps.

The most important part of

this series will be the dialogue

that we hope to inspire related

to these issues from those who

are dealing with these gaps on

a daily basis. So much of what

gets published in this and most

business-oriented journals gets

read by very few corporate

finance and accounting profes-

sionals due to time constraints

and the reality that once an

author starts a paragraph with

a phrase like “In THEORY, …”

most readers check out because

they are dealing with the REAL-

ITY of an ever-changing world.

We are in a world that is

changing faster than most of

us ever imagined it could and

where there is rapid change,

there is a tendency for both

education and practice to

lag behind in implementing

successful strategies to over-

come the challenges associ-

ated with such an increasingly

dynamic corporate landscape.

We all know that more and

more tasks within corporations

are being performed through

automation and technologies

laced with artificial intelligence.

As a result, the skills required

of those both in and coming

into finance and accounting

careers in the corporate world

are much different than they

were 10 or 20 years ago, and

they are going to be even more

different 10 or 20 years from

now. If we accept that as fact,

then CFOs and other corporate

leaders need to ask themselves

what skills and capabilities their

people are going to need to be

successful as both individuals

and as resources of the corpo-

ration. And, in a similar vein,

educators need to ask them-

selves if they have identified

those skills that their corporate

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