There were certain issues incur in the procedures of this research and they should be addressed for the benefit of the future research. First, it was difficult to get the
acceptance for the interview from the experts in the accounting fields. Second, the complexity of the accounting classification policies in the organisation is beyond our expectation. One individual or an accountant cannot give enough information for our investigation. Third, we notified during our field study that the experts in accounting fields have the difficulties in identifying ICT product and service. Based on the research experience, the following procedure should have been done:
- Performing content analysis on the financial statements of firms to identify the ICT incentive firms and their classification of ICT asset and expense.
- Analyse the Chart of Account (COA) and Asset List of the ICT incentive firms to identify the detail classification of ICT asset and expense at recording level.
- Perform the interview with experts in the ICT incentive organisation on the classification ICT asset and expense identified from COA and Asset list.
In the current study, we also collected the information from the annual report of ASX listing firms to get a brief understand of ICT classification at firm level at the preliminary stage of the study. To get deeper understanding into the classification of ICT investment, we proposed that the firms included in the preliminary stage of the study should be also included for the field interview in the second stage. Financial statements is also a public financial report as well as the data source that does not required any complicated procedure to access, for example, Ethic approval in our study.
The content analysis of the financial statements can let us identify the ICT incentive firms and gives us the abstract on the classification of ICT investments of the organisation. It should already well-understood from literatures as well as this study
that ICT is important for firms who reports ICT investment on their financial statements. The ICT reported firms have more experience on classifying ICT investment in financial accounting. We suggested that these are the type of firms that should have been invited for the detail investigation on the topic at the second stage of this study.
At the second stage of our study, we conducted the field interviews with the experts and use the classification of ICT product and service in (ABS, 2006) to describe ICT to the experts. ICT product and service were described to experts for every set of questionnaires because literature has informed us about the variation of the ICT definition. The experts are the accounting experts might have limited knowledge on ICT product and service. We also notified this problem during our field interview.
However, our current procedure does not require the accountants or the participants that knows much about ICT product and service; it was time consuming.
The investigator should identified and self-classify the existing ICT asset and expense in the organisation. The detail analysis of the organisation chart of account (COA) and the asset list should be done in advance to the interview with the experts.
By doing this, only the existing ICT asset and expense are included in the interview that allow the investigator to have more time focusing on collecting the information about the classification and capitalisation ICT from experts.
In our study, we found that an accountant cannot answer all the related questionnaires. Based on our experience, the classification of asset and expense and the capitalisation policies are not decided by the accountant only. The interview should be done with any related personnel who involve in decision making in organising the organisational COA. Based on our experience, the experts in senior
financial management level could provide more information regarding the classification of investment in financial accounting.
At the end of the study, the analysis can be performed. We used fsQCA analysis to verify if the justifications of high level capitalisation conditions explain the organisation capitalisation and expense of ICT expenditure. Theoretically, fsQCA allows for the analysis with small n cases, 5 cases. Yet, based on the experience with the current methodology implemented in this study, getting more cases shall be recommended.
It was difficult to get the commitment from the organisation to participate in the study. The accounting information is considered as sensitive for the organisation.
Also, it is required length of time to get acceptance for the interview, and the participants might not be able to make much time for the interview due to the nature of their work. In our study, we only get low rate of the participants. The improvement to the research methodology is required for the future researches.