Controlling 2030 (Re-)Konzeption des Controlling-Hauses der Zukunft für große österreichische Unternehmen

Abstract

Digitalisation, sustainability and agility are shaping the strategic orientation of many companies and are presenting new challenges for the controlling organization. The "Controlling House 2026" already highlighted a significant increase in demands placed on controllers, as well as a growing overload of existing resources. Since then, market dynamics have further intensified, making a (re-)evaluation of future controlling priorities indispensable. The aim of this master's thesis is to identify the key future topics of controlling for the year 2030 and to derive an updated "Controlling House 2030" from them. This is intended to serve as an orientation framework for corporate practice and, at the same time, to provide impulses for academic research and curriculum development in the field of controlling. The study follows a mixed-methods approach. First, eight semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with professionals and executives from academia and business practice. The qualitative content analysis was based on 32 controlling-related future topics derived from existing studies. On the one hand, the interviews served to deepen and potentially expand the set of future topics. On the other hand, they provided a substantiated qualitative assessment of these topics. Based on the insights gained from the interviews and the findings of existing studies, a questionnaire comprising a total of 38 future topics was developed. Participants were asked to assess the current importance (2025) and the expected relevance in 2030 for each topic. The online survey targeted professionals and executives from controlling, financial management and accounting departments of Austria’s 500 largest companies (by revenue) and was conducted from 7 to 26 April 2025. In total, 162 fully completed questionnaires were evaluated, resulting in a response rate of 29.24%. The majority of respondents had more than ten years of professional experience in controlling (60.5%) and held leadership positions (59.2%). The analysis shows that the five most relevant future topics in controlling for large Austrian companies by 2030 are: “information systems and their continuous development”, “business partnering”, “digital competencies”, “process automation”, and “internal reporting”. Between 2025 and 2030, the most significant increases in relevance are observed in the areas of “business analytics & AI”, “self-service reporting” and “sustainability”. As the range of topics continues to expand, the workload of controllers is increasing. “Efficiency enhancement”, “process automation” and “self-service reporting” are emerging as key relief factors. Due to recent regulatory developments, “sustainability” has been temporarily deprioritized, but remains a strategically important future topic in the medium term. The evaluation along various metadata dimensions reveals only minor differences, indicating a broad relevance of technology-driven developments. In addition, a structural shift is becoming evident: controlling is increasingly female, as compared to the findings of the study by EISL et al. from 2021.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Thomas Rockenschaub (Supervisor)