ICT in Italian companies
I recently read the article Le ICT non funzionano senza capitale organizzativo that could be translated as “ICTs don’t work without Organizational Capital”.
The source is www.lavoce.info, an authoritative source in matters of economical & political analysis, and this digression on Information Technology could represent an interesting prompt of discussion.
Some researches reveal the competitive gap of Italian firms compared to other countries’, and a corresponding lack of pervading ICT would be one of the causes of such a difference.
The investments in ICT between 2002-2004 allowed to reduce costs in paperwork areas, but the rate of companies that catch up the same results in strategic/productive areas is substantially lower .
The article argues how ICT affects Italian companies, and how this topic is so non-prioritized and misunderstood as a way to increase productivity.
I quote below some paragraphs of the article:
According to our investigation, the incapacity to obtain stategic returns is often due to:
1. Inadequate support to ICT investments by the top management, that often considers them as a “cost to be limited”
2. The difficulty of IT managers to have a clear vision of business requirements that such information systems must support, a factor which often leads to investements not in line with company strategy
The publication stab at the companies’ inertia to adopt proper organization models. The reason could be found in a lack of technological culture of the top management due to the small average size of the Italian companies that, therefore, have small resources to invest in organization/ICT restyling.
The remarkable elements in the companies which obtain best results by their ICT policy are shortly summarized:
The importance given to the human resources, a non-bureaucratic organization, the habit to share knowledge among employees, the adoption of performance-based incentives to individuals and teams, the presence of interfunctional team.
