Business Commons^™

Creating Effective Teams In A Classroom Environment, Kathryn A.S. Lancaster, Cyndi A. Crother

Accounting

For over a decade, companies have been concerned that new graduates are often not prepared to work in jobs where there they are required to contribute as a member of a team. In response, many educators have adopted team-based learning pedagogies, often referred to as cooperative learning. The use of teams has created additional class management issues and added to the complexity of class dynamics. While most students find team activities helpful, the authors have experienced a variety of problems encountered by various teams. For example, some class teams never function as a team, and the members end up working …

Think Before For A Better After, Kathryn A.S. Lancaster

Accounting

Think before you drive. Think before you trash it. Think before for a better after. These were all slogans used in a campaign on the California Polytechnic State University campus in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Two students worked with their college union and other areas of campus to promote recycling and energy and water conservation. The central goal of this campaign was to influence students to think about their actions and change their behaviors to be more eco-friendly. The recycling opportunities at Cal Poly are plentiful. Students, staff, and faculty members each have two containers in their dorm room or …

Making Better Use Of Information: Aiming Towards "True North", Kathryn A.S. Lancaster, William J. Bellows

Accounting

'If I only had the right information, I could make an informed decision'. How often have you heard that comment? With the information technology currently at our disposal, one would think that the right information would be available and that all decisions would be sound. However, users must still determine what data provides valuable information and what are the limitations of the soundness of a decision. What has been missing from most decision models is prediction awareness, as well as a 'true north' compass reading for the organization, based on goals that reflect the system within the organization and that …

Rethinking Ais: An Innovative Financial Information Systems Curriculum, Joseph Callaghan, Arline Savage, Eileen Peacock

Accounting

This paper describes a new Financial Information Systems curriculum that integrates information technology and financial information in the development of business information systems, and discusses the problems we experienced in establishing the new program. Our intention is to provide accounting graduates with the knowledge they need to leverage the latest information technologies to support the use of financial information in management decision-making, and to integrate financial information and internal controls into business information systems. Our cross-disciplinary approach expands the horizons of our students, from one of viewing accounting as a stand-alone, untimely, inflexible information system, capturing only “accounting transactions” and …

Financial Analysts And Enron: Asleep At The Wheel?, Arline Savage, Cynthia Miree

Accounting

We attempt to replicate the duties of financial analysts by performing accounting and financial analyses for Enron, using information contained in the firm's Security and Exchange Commission filings and in annual and quarterly reports that were available to analysts prior to the firm's collapse. We focus on Enron accounting policies, estimates, and financial measures that reflect the key risk areas that we identified in our strategy analysis.

Given that the purpose of accounting analysis is to evaluate the degree to which a firm's accounting system captures its underlying economic reality, we attempt to assess the degree of distortion in Enron's …