INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SOPHISTICATION, MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING INFORMATION PROVISION AND COMPUTER-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS SUCCESS

The emergence of a knowledge-based economy, consequent to the advancement in information technology (IT), puts more pressure on businesses to generate information to quicklycreate technologically advanced andcustomised products at relatively low costs. Firms, particularly small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), need to understandand rely more on strategic accounting information and recognise the potential that IT has in generating these information. This paper reports theresults ofastudy whichoffers anexplanationfor therelationship between IT sophistication and computer-based information systems (CBlS) success of SMEs, by incorporating into the model the provision of management accounting information (MAl provision). Datawere collected from 214 SMEs in Malaysia by way of a questionnaire-based survey. Theresultsshowed that IT sophistication isadeterminantofMAl provision, whichin turn, isadeterminant of CBlS success. Overall, the results suggested that MAl provision plays a mediating role in the relationship between IT sophistication and CBlS success of SMEs. An interpretation of these results is that those SMES which employ sophisticated IT can generate sufficient management accounting information and thereby improoe their CBlS