Technology-driven workforce management in multi-utilities

In some business environments the pressure toward innovation can be very weak (e.g., Hughes, 1983). When competitive pressures are low, so are the ones toward managing workforces, and the organization of work at large. The paper reports an exploratory study conducted in an Italian multi-utility company (ARTIO - fictional name) that, regardless of the absence of traditional competitive pressures, at the end of 2014 decided to undertake ARTIO 3.0 – a courageous project of organizational and technological innovation; in such respect, a vehicle for adopting an aggressive strategy of cost reduction and quality improvement. The financial results achieved – already in 2016 - demonstrated that ARTIO 3.0 not only represented a real strategic breakthrough, enabling a dramatic improvement of the operational and economic performance and value sharing towards several stakeholders (customers, shareholders, employees, suppliers, natural environment), but also a substantial rethinking the company's role and responsibility in its social and economic settings (Henfridsson, Mathiassen and Svahn, 2014; Constantinides and Barrett, 2015). ARTIO 3.0 is an Information Technology-driven project, designed and implemented in partnership with one of the world’s leaders in ERP solutions (Enterprise Resource Planning), yet based on customized but non-ad-hoc developed solutions. The initiative allowed ARTIO to rethink the whole customer experience via the design of end-to-end processes and the redefinition of the technical and managerial skills needed. This revolution in the operating model required a major organizational redesign based on the complete digitization of both ARTIO’s operational infrastructure and network management processes (redefining its operating model), as well as a radical review its workforce management logic (Work Force Management) and performance measurement system (i.e., Spagnoletti, Resca and Lee, 2015).