The Future of Education

This paper reports on the strategies, processes, difficulties and lessons learned by management managing the IT integration process. The necessity of higher education accounting programmes to include information technologies has long been established [1,2,3,4]. The academic department implemented a new accountancy programme in 2020 with the purpose of embedding IT to a greater extent than other similar offerings in South Africa. The IT integration did not focus on educational technologies like Learning Management Systems as these were already in place, but rather focused on incorporating software technologies relevant to the accounting profession. This study is part of a larger research project, where the potential alignment from the triangulation of findings from lecturers, management and students will be analysed to add resilience to the design of an accounting IT integration educational framework. In 2024 we reported on the experiences from lecturers having to implement IT. Two cohorts of students exited the academic programme at the end of 2023 and 2024 which provides the ideal opportunity to critically analyze the strategies and processes followed, hindrances and intervening factors that led to course corrections, and lessons learned from all the relevant stakeholders in this IT integration process. Imperative to the success of this integration is the buy-in, strategies followed and management of the IT integration process. As stated by Sanik and Broad (2011), there are “…intervening factors that should be tackled...” [5]. The findings from the interviews of managers will be presented in this paper where a convergent parallel mixed method research design was employed. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from management responsible for overseeing the implementation process of IT integration. The insights derived from this critical analysis are poised to contribute to a framework to assist higher eduction insitutions in sustaining the dynamic change of IT in accounting curricula to ensure accounting graduates remain aligned with the evolving demands of the financial sector despite disruptors (like COVID-19).