practices, the ever-increasing use of IS to carry out activities and the reduction of time spent on each
single case: “technologies are improved: information procedures support the daily work because they
are a sort of ’duplicate’ of administration procedures” (Operator, central regional branch).
It is possible to identify an impact both at the individual and at the organizational level. On the
first level, the experience described by the new bureaucrats is sometimes characterized by coercive
aspects. The interviewees describe their actions as if they were almost “appendices of a procedure or a
regulation”. Daily work is tied to pre-established and repetitive procedural activities, which reflect the
rules in force. On an organizational level, IS support in various ways the work process that the file has to
follow, providing screening and controlling actions. Among the changes described by the interviewees,
the most significant are the gradual rise of a process-based organization and the establishment of a
planning, evaluation and control system enabled by technology. One interviewee declared that:
. . . even if within the structure the paper-based files tend to disappear and their processing has
changed considerably, the organization, unfortunately, hasn’t followed the same course. We still
have an organization that is similar to the previous one and that still works with isolated departments
(Operator, metropolitan branch).
The acknowledgment of the existence of a dichotomy between the organizational structure, still concerned
with the past, and technologies that allow workers to operate in a flexible and process-based way, was
underlined by many interviewees, for example:
. . . in our local office we didn’t have changes in the structure. For example, the accounting department
has remained the same even if when I was employed there the office’s name was “Ragioneria”
[Accounting], the Companies Department has been given many different titles but it still deals with
employers. There was a change in the planning but not everyone understood it: the process-based
organization, which had to be the central element, in substance lost its strength (Operator, northern
regional branch).
However, especially at the beginning of the process, the interviewees noticed the presence of a certain
resistance in the older civil servants and in those with little computer knowledge. The difficulty of
learning newoperative methods, modifying the routine, is a typical element of a bureaucratic organization.
However, the older interviewees underline the importance of their younger colleagues, who have greater
knowledge in computers:
. . . INAIL invested in basic training in information technology,but the presence of “expert” colleagues
in everyday work has been really fundamental to learning the “new” information procedures. In the
past, as well as nowadays, to learn “how the information procedures work” makes the difference
between being part (or not) of the organization. For this reason, some of my older colleagues decided
to retire. In my opinion, to learn the “new” information procedures has meant to be part of the
“new” organization.
Working inside a new community of users has made it possible to activate learning processes which aim
to acquire new knowledge and to create a new community of practice [27]. In this case, to learn the “new
information procedures” indicates that one belongs to the community. Technologies, therefore, seem to
have created a context which has formed and changed the interviewees’ way of working [7].