Indonesia's Growing Role in Accounting Information Systems Research
If you had surveyed the accounting information systems (AIS) literature ten years ago, the Indonesian footprint would have been modest: a handful of single-case studies, a few survey-based ERP adoption papers, and occasional pieces by Indonesian doctoral candidates publishing out of Australian and Dutch programs. The picture in 2024 looks meaningfully different.
Three trends are reshaping the field domestically, and they are starting to register on regional and international platforms as well.
1. Institutional concentration is forming
AIS research in Indonesia is no longer evenly thinly spread across dozens of business faculties. Clear institutional centers have emerged: Universitas Indonesia, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Universitas Airlangga, and a small cluster of private universities including Universitas Bina Nusantara are now producing the bulk of refereed AIS output from the country. Each has at least one tenured faculty member with an active publication record in IS or AIS outlets, and most run dedicated MSc or PhD tracks where AIS topics are explicitly supervised.
This concentration matters. It means doctoral students entering the field have local supervisors who can credibly examine AIS-specific methodologies — design science, process mining, control framework evaluation — rather than being routed through general management or accounting supervision.
2. The chapter scaffolding is stabilizing
The Association for Information Systems Indonesia Chapter, AISINDO, has become a useful scaffolding for the field. Its annual symposium — the most recent edition was held in Surabaya in November 2023 — provides a domestic venue for in-progress work, a doctoral consortium, and informal mentoring that used to be available only at expensive international conferences in Australia or Europe. We covered the 2023 edition here.
Beyond the symposium, the chapter operates as a coordination layer: a mailing list of active AIS scholars, a referral channel for journal special issues, and an informal review pool for early-career manuscripts. None of this is dramatic on its own, but the cumulative effect is a community that can sustain itself without depending on irregular international visits.
3. Research questions are getting more locally specific
Perhaps the most encouraging shift is in the questions Indonesian AIS researchers are asking. Less work now simply replicates Western adoption-of-technology surveys with Indonesian samples. More work engages problems that genuinely look different in Indonesia: AIS in Sharia-compliant banking, audit data analytics under PSAK accounting standards, ERP implementations across geographically dispersed plantation and mining operations, and information systems supporting micro and small enterprise reporting under simplified tax regimes.
The interesting Indonesian AIS papers in 2023–24 are not the ones that say "we ran TAM in Indonesia." They are the ones that say "here is a control or reporting problem that does not exist in the textbook, and here is how Indonesian firms actually solve it."
Constraints worth naming
The picture is not uniformly positive. Indonesian AIS scholarship still publishes disproportionately in domestic journals with limited international visibility. English-language production is improving but uneven, and access to commercial enterprise data (the kind required for rich AIS case studies) remains harder to negotiate than in some neighboring economies. Funding for travel to top-tier IS conferences — ICIS, ECIS, PACIS — is also tight outside the largest universities.
Still, the trajectory is clear. Indonesia is no longer a peripheral contributor to ASEAN AIS scholarship; on several topical fronts it is becoming a regional leader. The 2024 symposium edition will be a useful check on whether the trend is accelerating.