Identifying and Ranking the Informational Requirements of the Iranian Armed Forces’ Accounting Organizations

The Identification and ranking of the informational requirements of an accounting organization provides the first step towards decreasing the probability of acting on irrelevant or erroneous information, and thus, improving the performance and avoiding risks such as financial loss or time-wastage. Despite the importance of this matter, thus far there has been no comprehensive study of the informational requirements of the Iranian armed forces’ accounting organizations which form a significant subset of the Iranian public sector. As such, the aim of this study is to identify and rank the informational requirements of such organizations. For this purpose, modus operandi of this study consisted of reviewing the relevant literature on the matter and conducting interviews with 10 experts in this field. After analyzing the data via thematic analysis method, a survey was developed and subsequently filled by 91 respondents. The statistical findings point towards the importance of five accounting information requirements for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Finally, the findings were ranked via the Shannon entropy method. "Facilitating the performance evaluations", "improving accountability towards stakeholders" have the highest priority, whilst "the role of accounting system in budgeting" and "implementing and improving internal controls have the lowest priority, respectively. These findings could be utilized by relevant organizations and information systems suppliers, for the design, evaluation, selection, and implementation accounting information systems.