INTRODUCTION

Here we report a message which appeared in a forum of finance from an important Italian Bank call center:

“Is there a financial promoter of the Bank AA in the forum that can help me? I need some information about a new bank account for trading. I have already contacted the call center and I have asked few trivial questions, but if you ask something which is different from the standard, the operators are completely unable to request.”

This anecdotal story shows a weakness of today’s call centres, especially in the financial service industry: customer service quality and responsiveness depend not only on the competencies and skills of the operators, but more and more also on the technologies which support their tasks. The diffusion of information technology has improved the efficiency and efficacy of customer service through web-based technology and other information technologies which have enhanced the ability of operators to quickly respond to customers needs. However, despite these improvements, the technologies which support call centre operators are often planned to help only with simple standardized questions. They are not able to provide answers to more complex, non-routinary questions.

Organizations sometimes fail in choosing the right technologies to support certain tasks or business processes. As in the case of the call center, operators do not handle the right sources of information, in order to respond to customers’ questions.

The problem of the link between IT investments and business performance has been extensively debated both by academics and practitioners. One of the key to understand the impact of IT is to study the link between IT and the organization and, specifically, the link among organizational tasks and processes and IT functionalities. Organizations which understand how to fit technologies and organizational tasks are able to support and improve business processes and to fully exploit the potential of IT. The problem of fitting task characteristics with information technologies is often ignored by firms at micro-level (individual and work group level) because it requires a micro-analysis of the functions of information technologies.

We aim at lighting some shadows on the real effectiveness of IT investments, in order to explain how certain organizations have better performance than others using the more feasible technologies to support their processes.

TECHNOLOGY USAGE: CONTEXT AND CHALLENGES

Many challenges exist for small and medium enterprises and one of the most important is ineffective technology utilization. This theme is common with many other industries. A recent research conducted by Microsoft, for instance, underlines that many small businesses are falling behind in adopting effective technologies and in implementing the right ITs for important business functions. A senior manager of Microsoft has concluded that:

“Over the last five years, business has spent too much of its IT budget on the purchase of ineffective departmentally focused data interrogation tools”

In the next section, we will introduce a framework of research in order to deepen the above issues of technology adoption and usage in the publishing industry. Our research had three objectives: identify the most used technology, identify the role of KM technology, and verify if best performer firms are those with the higher technology usage.

The research focused on the link among organizational processes and technology usage. The task technology fit framework, which has been used as theoretical reference, is a critical construct that highlights the importance of fit between the technology and the task to be performed as predictor of individual and organizational performance.

The framework posits that information technologies, and especially knowledge management technologies, have a positive impact on organizational performance only when technology usage is high, which, in turn, is influenced by the correspondence between technological functionalities and the task requirements of users. This approach considers technology as made up of features and tools which support business processes, and individual or collective tasks. Users seem to view technology and information systems as a set of tools which assist or hinder them in the performance of their task. As information requirements increase, users respond more strongly to those IS features that meet the task demands, needs and preferences.

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

During the last two decades the development and diffusion of information technologies and the rapid growth of the Internet had a strong impact on many service industries. The publishing industry that is actually shaping is a technology-enabled publishing industry made up of technology-enabled media companies.

Traditional editors have to compete with technology-enabled media companies such as Yahoo, Google, AOL, Amazon. IT has profoundly changed the creation, development and selling of publishing products. Digital content, news portals, online subscriptions and e-commerce, but also blog, podcast, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) have change the roles of the firms and the rules of the market.

The characteristics of the publishing market make it feasible for the commercial Internet.

• The market has very low barriers to entry.
• As market concentration grows, market niches also increases in number and the amount of small and hyper-specialized publishers increases. In the book segment of the Italian market there are still thousands of publishers, ranging in size from those who publish only a single book to those who publish thousands.
• There are not any significant proprietary technologies in the industry and the most common technology, both for production and marketing, are available to every firms.
• The value chain of the industry is large and segmented. It is made up of authors, who produce contents, and of papermaking and printmaking who offers products and service to the publishers. The publishers edit and screen the content to add value, develop marketing campaigns, and build networks of distribution relationships.
• Distribution channels may vary from bookshops, large scale retail outlets, newsstand and e-commerce channels. There appears to be a consolidation of the trend towards ever greater articulation of the bookshop channel among independents, small bookstores, bookshops located in shopping centres and chain stores.

It is noticeable that the growth of internet and e-business applications has three major effects on the structure and size of the market:

1. Expands market dimensions through the development of new products,
2. Shifts its boundaries through advertising,
3. Multiplies selling channels.

HOW FIRMS VIEW TECHNOLOGIES

A rapid technological evolution seems to characterize the Italian publishing industry. Although many CEO, especially among small firms, consider technology as a threat for their actual competitive position  more than an opportunity (many of them operates in market niches). The Web is considered by most of the CEOs as an important infrastructure and most of firms have e-commerce application (less firms use e-procurement).

It is possible to use different metrics to assess technology performance.

Some metrics refer to the adoption of common standard, the IS security, the interoperability and the scalability. However, these technological features are often invisible to end-users because are referred to the whole information systems.

During our research, we discover that the perception of users about the capability of the technology refers to different features. Here we named the most significant:

• information seeking capabilities,
• knowledge management capabilities,
• media communication richness,
• presentation richness capabilities,
• process support capabilities.

Based on the above features, we have clustered the most common information technologies into six categories:

1. information seeking technologies (for instance: Google, ...),
2. knowledge management technologies (KM systems, individual and organizational EPSS, organizational databases, etc.),
3. communication technologies (mail, chat, voicemail, videoconferencing, etc.),
4. web-based e-business technologies (e-commerce, e-procurement, e-CRM),
5. office automation technologies,
6. process support technologies (technologies, such as ERP or workflow management systems, which are primarily thought to structure information and work flows).

Although many technologies obviously fall into more than a category, it is possible to choose one category, according to users’ perception of their core function. Thus, these categories has been compared with those used by professional portals such as Computer World[1], Technology Evaluation Center[2] and ITAA[3] and has been discussed with the CIOs of two publishing firms and with the research study of AIE (the Italian Publishing Association).