Nuove tecnologie e cambiamenti organizzativi: alcune implicazioni per le imprese italiane

The recent literature on the productivity gains due to the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) has stressed the importance of the complementarities between ICT and organizational change. The ICT enable to process and diffuse a large amount of information. The reduction in information costs facilitates a higher level of coordination. The organizational implementation of ICT requires two prerequisites: the codification of the organization processes and their standardization, necessary to allow a full information exchange among the different processes. The introduction of ICT is less costly and more effective in those kinds of internal and external corporate activities that prior to the change are already formalized. ICT diffusion is therefore faster in large firms and in the supply chains they dominate. The 2001 Survey on the investment of industrial firms with more than 50 employees (Invind) by the Bank of Italy shows a high degree of diffusion of the PCs, and other types of hardware in the Italian firms; most of them seem to use the Internet. There seems to be a clear link between firm size and the rate of adoption of the new technologies. The impact of new technologies on organizational change is still moderate and appears strongly related to firm size.