Reviews for Social Accounting for Development Planning with Special Reference to Sri Lanka

The average rating for Social Accounting for Development Planning with Special Reference to Sri Lanka based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-17 00:00:00 Mark Wd Thompson A piece of history written at the time when the business world wasn't quite yet sold on the Personal Computer Revolution. It's an introduction to the use of computers from the 1's and 0's up to AI for the use of accountants. I was actually quite impressed with how many of my CS classes content this textbook touched upon - from software engineering to database systems to architecture...the accounting student who read this book would have at least been acquainted with broad strokes to pretty close to the entirety of computer science as I learned it through this book, though obviously they would trust the experts with the finer details and actual programming. But for the purposes of being able to think critically about, and assess a particular computer-based solution this is probably all the details you would need. It was also at a strange time in computer history, where the free software movement hadn't yet found its voice, so the competition between development methodologies were 'in house' versus 'proprietary' (the proprietary software vendors being the upstart rebels trying to free people from reliance on lock-in from the in-house priesthood). Even so: the textbook is very clear that even in the case of proprietary software, you should *always* have access to the source code(!). It was also written in the middle of one of the AI winters, and somehow didn't get the memo - so included a good chunk of space dedicated towards AI as they understood it at the time, expert systems and game/chess playing and whatnot. Apparently this is not common practice anymore in accounting, though one must sometimes wonder why. One thing though, in retrospect, is even given a small chapter on NGOs, much of this textbook was written from the perspective of giving management more control over what happens, more and closer to realtime/actionable information, and generally - more power over the lives of the customers, employees and suppliers of organizations, large and small. It didn't have to be this way. The same computer technology *could* have been used, instead, to empower the workers, to *decrease* the power of management, to decentralize decisionmaking, to reduce the possibilities and incentives for fraud by flattening organization trees...but that is not how this book was written. This book could probably thus be rewritten from scratch, for the modern age...with an eye for this explicit goal. Such a book would be a valuable thing to have around. Imagine if instead of relying on accounting systems written by proprietary, unsafe software vendors who see fit to promote the management/1%/investors...that we instead write software that unions could demand that management allow to be used in contract negotiations. Software that empowers workers, that gives them control over the means of production. That eliminates not frontline jobs but *manager* jobs. The software and hardware around us could support that. Given the increase of wages of managers over the past decade or so it seems like this would be low-hanging fruit...if there were institutions capable of pushing the software to be actually used. We won't get it used without a struggle, and here is the point This textbook has *hundreds* of examples of this kind of struggle, being walked through as exercises for the student. It seems like that's how the author tried to keep things interesting - by constantly bringing in real examples and case studies of companies facing decisions of what technology and processes to implement and how. But once you've seen enough of these case studies you start to realize that the same kinds of critical thought can be directed towards management...but just wasn't. It's a gap in the thinking of accountants at a field level, circa 1990. Also noteworthy, was that through most of the book, the attacker seen as the main threat is not the teenage hacker - it's #1 management #2 management #3 insiders granted power over the computer system due to their role (think: snowden). Over and over again it's made clear that you don't freak out over the external attackers when the main threat is already on the inside of your fortress. However there *is* a chapter on hackers. And it's a relatively good one, providing the history of criminal/black hat hacking against commercial systems going right back to the very early days. And it really goes to show that accounting as represented in this book is really just an exercise for the blue team - analyzing and understanding information and financial systems to find their weak points, and address them before the red team does the same. I'm sure this chapter will serve as a reference for later.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-04 00:00:00 Heather Hawkins good