External complexity and the design of management control systems: a case study
通过追踪一家房地产基金管理公司应对外部复杂性、设计管理控制系统的过程，发现内部交互式系统因缺乏外部信息而失效，最终公司开发了依赖外部定性信息、集体智慧和结构化会议的系统，以支持战略监控。
Increasing complexity and dynamism in technologies and markets are putting new demands on management control systems beyond those that these systems traditionally address. This longitudinal case study traces the experience of a real estate fund management company in addressing the need to make sense of increasing external complexity and its effort to design a management control system to support top management in this task. Our findings indicate that internally-focused systems used interactively fail to fulfill this role because of their paucity in terms of information on external complexity. As a result, the company experimented with various designs and developed a management control system that relied on information external to the organization and mostly qualitative. This system became the infrastructure for continual discussions on strategic but also tactical implications of external events. The system that the company developed relied on the wisdom of crowds, structured meetings, and information technology to gather and process qualitative information to enhance peripheral vision. Overall, the case study illustrates the challenges and potential responses to the design of management control systems for the strategic surveillance of external complexity.