UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MODENA E REGGIO EMILIA
Dottorato di ricerca in
LAVORO, SVILUPPO E INNOVAZIONE
Ciclo XXXI
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF METHODOLOGIES FOR THE DIGITAL BUSINESS SCENARIO
Candidato Roberta De Michele
Relatore (Tutor): Prof. Marco Furini Correlatore (Co-Tutor): Prof.ssa Claudia Canali
Coordinatore del Corso di Dottorato: Prof.ssa Tindara Addabbo
Abstract
The phenomenon of Digital Transformation regards the application of new digital technologies to almost all fields and aspects of modern society and daily life, with a particular focus on the organization and business environment, where it disrupts every department from marketing and manufacturing to sales and human resources and so on.
Each area that digital touches, will require the implementation and use of different tools for its successful management, because of the great heterogeneity of data resulting from digitalization. On the basis of these premises, this research project aims to propose methodologies of analysis for scenarios that result from the introduction of social, collaborative and web-based technologies in the context of business activities, being them applied to the internal environment of the organization, from management to the workforce, through the adoption of platforms, intranets, human resource information systems and so on, or rather related to the external environment of the organization and thus to the relationships with customers that, with their interactions between each other, with the company and on the media, necessarily end up influencing business dynamics, processes and goals. A general research question therefore concerns the opportunities, and eventually risks, that the digital economy envisages for the organization and how the latter can take better advantage of them. To answer this question, we looked at specific key areas in the economy and the society on which these advances have a major impact upon, to see what the main issues are and which solutions can be implemented, and we proposed a series of methodologies that can be useful to act on each specific field, and that we tested through different experimental designs and case studies that imply the use and analysis of real data. In particular, we have seen how the digital scenario is changing habits and behaviours of people, when they work, when they entertain themselves, in the way they live their city and in the way they consume and purchase. We thus proceeded with the analysis of specific fields such as citizen sensing through social media to improve smart city management, Twitter and Instagram conversations analysis to offer guidelines for effective cross-media advertising and influencer marketing strategy implementation, and improvement of viewers’ engagement with commercials through gamification approaches to be implemented on second screen applications and with the application of user-tailored advertising systems to video on demand platforms. Since the way people use technologies in their daily activities is influencing the workplace as well, we investigated which specific skills related to technologies introduction in the organization are required for new configurations of work like smart working, we explored how collaborative technologies are used in the organization for work purposes and what metrics could best evaluate the level of adotpion and value of enterprise social platforms, and we proposed tools and analyses for a better understanding and monitoring of the phenomenon of absenteeism in the organization.
Sintesi
Il fenomeno della Trasformazione Digitale riguarda l’applicazione di nuove tecnologie digitali alla maggioranza degli aspetti della società moderna e della vita quotidiana, con particolare focus sull’ambito organizzativo, dove è modificato radicalmente ogni settore, dal marketing alle vendite, alla manifattura e alle risorse umane, ecc. Ogni area trasfromata dal digitale richiede l’implementazione e uso di strumenti specifici anche a causa della grande eterogeneità dei dati che risultano dal proceso di digitalizzazione. Sulla base di queste premesse, questo progetto di ricerca mira a proporre metodologie di analisi di scenari modificati dall’introduzione di tecnologie digitali, collaborative, social e basate sul web nel contesto delle attività di business, sia che si tratti dell’ambiente interno all’organizzazione e
quindi alle relazioni e ai processi di lavoro, sia riguardo all’ambiente esterno all’organizzazione e quindi alle relazioni con i clienti, ma anche con gli utenti in generale che, interagendo tra loro e con l’azienda, influenzando le dinamiche e i processi di business.
Una generale domanda di ricerca riguarda dunque le opportunità e gli eventuali rischi connessi con l’espansione dell’economia digitale, a cui si tenta di rispondere andando a individuare e focalizzarsi su aree specifiche su cui le trasformazioni hanno avuto più impatto, per capire quali sono le questioni principali e come possono essere affrontate o quali soluzioni possono essere implementate. Abbiamo quindi proposto una serie di metodologie utili per intervenire sui campi considerati e che sono state testate attraverso diversi disegni sperimentali adeguati ai singoli casi di studio e ai dati a disposizione. In particolare, abbiamo visto come lo scenario digitale sta cambiando abitudini e comportamenti delle persone a lavoro, nel tempo libero, nel modo in cui vivono gli pazi pubblici come le città, e nel modo in cui consumano e fanno acquisti. Per questo, l’analisi ha riguardato campi specifici, tra cui lo studio su come l’interazione tra i cittadini e la città e la relativa attività sui social possa generare dati utili agli amministratori per migliorare la qualità della vita e rendere le città davvero Smart, oppure l’analisi di conversazioni e post su Instagram e Twitter per offrire linee guida per un efficace promozione di prodotti e servizi di intrattenimeto sui canali social, o in merito alla selezione di ambassador e influencer che potenzino la strategia di marketing delle aziende. Ancora, si è pensato a prototipi di applicazioni in grado di migliorare il rapporto degli utenti con la pubblicità attraverso approcci di gamification o di personalizzazione dei messaggi pubblicitari. Dal momento che le tecnologie, con la loro pervasività, influenzano anche il modo di lavorare e di interagire con i colleghi e la struttura aziendale, abbiamo indagato anche quali possano essere le competenze richieste ai lavoratori del futuro cui si prospettano nuove configurazioni lavorative come lo Smart working, o ancora come i lavoratori usano i social network aziendali e le tecnologie collaborative per portare a termine i loro incarichi, provando inoltre a proporre metriche per la valutazione dell’adozione e dell’utilità percepita di tali piattaforme in azienda. Infine, ulteriori analisi sono state condotte per indagare i possibili antecedenti che influenzano la propensione a compiere più o meno atti digitali sulle piattaforme aziendali o a essere più o meno assenti sul luogo di lavoro, in quest’ultimo caso proponendo, oltre ad analisi statistiche, anche strumenti di data visualization che possano supportare la conoscenza di tali fenomeni da parte dei manager, oltre che le eventuali decisioni da attuare in risposta ai casi critici.
Index
Introduction ... 7
1.
Internal business environment ... 9
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND WEB-BASED TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ORGANIZATION ... 9
Preliminary study on Smart Working: “Smart Working, Smart Learning: Skills And Competences In The Digital Era” ... 10
1. Background ... 11
2. Smart Working Through Official Papers ... 13
3. Smart Working Through Experiences Of Italian Companies ... 14
a. Methodology ... 14
b. Analysis ... 15
c. Main Concepts ... 16
4. Corpus-Based Analysis ... 19
a. Main Results From Corpus Analysis ... 19
5. Conclusions ... 21
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIAL COLLABORATION TOOLS ... 22
Case study #1: “Social Technologies for the Workplace: Metrics Proposal for Adoption Assessment” ... 23
1. Related Work ... 23
2. Proposed Metrics ... 25
3. Case Study Evaluation ... 27
a. Case Study Description ... 27
b. Evaluation Results ... 29
4. Users’ Activity on Enterprise Social Platforms ... 31
5. Conclusions ... 31
DATA-DRIVEN HR/ PEOPLE ANALYTICS ... 32
Case study #2: "Understanding the phenomenon of Absenteeism" ... 32
1. Problem Definition ... 32
a. The Company ... 33
2. Literature Review ... 34
a. Absenteeism ... 34
b. HR Analytics and Data Visualization ... 37
3. Methodology ... 37
a. Data preparation ... 38
b. Visualization and Analysis Tools ... 39
4. Analysis Implementation ... 39
a. Data Visualization ... 39
b. Results ... 44
5. Conclusions ... 44
Chapter Bibliography ... 46
2.
External business environment ... 49
SOCIAL MEDIA SENSING: MOBILE DATA, SENSORS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS ... 49
TV SHOWS AND ADVERTISING ... 51
Case study #1 “TV Commercials: Improving Viewers Engagement Through Gamification and Second Screen” ... 53
1. Proposal ... 54
2. Related Work ... 56
3. Experimental Assessment ... 57
a. The Experimental Scenario ... 57
b. The Game ... 58
c. Results ... 59
4. Conclusions ... 61
Case study #2 “The Use of Hashtags in TV-Shows: Analysis and Guidelines” ... 61
1. Analysis of Official Hashtag Usage ... 63
a. Sample And Methodology ... 63
b. Availability and Visibility of Official Hashtag ... 63
2. Hashtags Usage ... 65
a. Hashtag Popularity ... 65
b. Most Prolific Authors ... 66
c. Most Retweeted Authors ... 67
3. Tweet Analysis ... 68
4. Guidelines ... 70
5. Conclusions ... 71
Case study #3 “Viewer-Tailored Advertising for Video on Demand Platforms” ... 71
1. Our Proposal ... 72
2. Related Work ... 73
3. The Tailored Advertising System ... 73
a. The Model ... 74
b. The Architeture ... 75
c. The Algorithm ... 76
4. Prototype ... 77
5. Conclusions And On-Going Improvements ... 78
EMERGING TRENDS IN MARKETING ... 78
Case study #1 “Influencer Identification And Selection In Social Networking Sites: An Analysis On Instagram” ... 78
1. Literature Background ... 80
a. Influencers on Social Media ... 80
b. Selection of Influencers on Social Media ... 82
c. Influencers and Instagram ... 84
2. Research Questions ... 85
3. Methodology ... 85
a. Sample Development ... 85
b. Users’ Ranking ... 88
4. Results and Discussion ... 89
5. Implications ... 92
6. Conclusions ... 93
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND SMART CITIES ... 94
Case Study #1 “Smart City and Images: The use of Image Hashtags to Get Insights on Citizens” ... 94
1. Related Work ... 95
2. Image Caption Analysis ... 97
3. Experimental Analysis ... 98
4. Results and Discussion ... 99
5. Conclusions ... 100
Chapter Bibliography ... 101
Conclusions ... 108
Introduction
The phenomenon of Digital Transformation can be defined, in its wider sense, as the application of new digital technologies to most – if not all – fields and aspects of modern society and daily life, with a particular focus on the organization and business environment.
Looking at this first basic definition, while more specific ones will be provided in the following, it is possible to understand how technologies seem to be the main driver of a long series of social, cultural, managerial, operational and organizational changes, although the transformation they trigger is largely argued to be going beyond the simple tout court adoption of technologies and tools, but rather a fundamental redefinition of business processes and models.
It is in this step that the difference between digitization and digital transformation becomes not only useful, but crucial. Indeed, digitization refers specifically to the process of converting analog information into a digital format, that imply the organization of information into discrete units of data or bits and the possibility of reading and processing them through computers. While usually the terms digitization and digitalization are used interchangeably, some argue that there is a difference in the meaning, the second referring to the process of moving to a digital business that uses digital technologies in a way that can facilitate work practices or change actual standards (Gartner, 2015; Gray and Rumpe, 2015) Digital transformation collocates itself a step further on this path of change: it is the integration and coordination of all the fields and trajectories where digitized data and digital applications can build synergies to envision new business models (Matt et al., 2015).
As argued by Bowersox et al., the core of Digital Transformation resides in the revolution from Industrial Age to Information Age, that necessarily implied the “conversion, reinventing and positioning of business operations, processes, and relationships to fully exploit information technology” (Bowersox et al., 2005).
While on the conceptual level there’s still an open debate on whether the technology has influenced the cultural change or, viceversa, a cultural change is necessary to allow for the technology to be adopted, at least it has been widely ascertained that culture is a fundamental element of influence in the process (Zhu, 2006; Kane et al., 2015; Kane et al., 2017; Heavin and Power, 2018; Zomer, 2018), as it emerged also in the first sub-chapter of this work, a preliminary study on Smart Working in Italian enterprises.
On the basis of these premises, this research project aims to propose methodologies of analysis for scenarios that result from the introduction of social, collaborative and web- based technologies in the context of business activities, being them applied to the internal environment of the organization, from management to the workforce, through the adoption of platforms, intranets, human resources information systems and so on, or rather related to the external environment of the organization and thus to the relationships with customers that, with their interactions, necessarily end up influencing business dynamics, processes and goals.
A general research question therefore concerns the opportunities, and eventually risks, that the digital economy envisages for the organization and how the latter can take better advantage of them.
To answer this question, we looked at specific key areas in the economy and the society on which these advances have a major impact upon, to see what the main issues are and which solutions can be implemented.
We proposed a series of methodologies that can be useful to act on each specific field, and that we tested through different experimental designs and case studies that imply the use and analysis of real data.
Case studies will include application of methodologies to organizations’ internal databases or platforms, or – on the opposite – to data coming from external social networks or from the web, justifying the choice of the structure of the present work that articulates in two main chapters.
The two chapters referring to the internal and external systems to which the organization relates, will briefly describe the context and will then introduce the specific areas of application and related case studies, treated as sub-chapters. At the end of each chapter, a related bibliography is listed. Conclusions and future direction of research close the work after Chapter 2 bibliography.
1. Internal business environment
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND WEB-BASED TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ORGANIZATION
According to Gartner, digital business transformation is “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model” (Gartner, 2015) or, in more general terms, the integration of digital technology into all areas of an organization with the result of fundamental changes to how the organization operates and how it creates and deliver value to customers.
Hess et al. indeed identify four main areas involved in the transformation when they define digital transformation as “the changes that digital technologies can bring about in a company’s business model, products, processes and organizational structure” (Hess et al., 2016).
While many underline how digital transformation isn’t really only about technology (MIT, 2011), this creates an interesting paradox, since it is impossible to deny the role technologies had as driving forces of this change process.
Forces that, as argued by Lanzolla and Anderson, have led to three main trends –digital interaction between users and with contents, digital communication channels and pervasive digital interconnectivity – that business cannot ignore (Lanzolla and Anderson, 2008).
From the great diffusion of smart devices for mobile connectivity such as smartphones and tablets with their related apps, to the birth and growing use of social networks and web 2.0, the behaviour of both consumers and employees has indeed significantly changed, allowing for increasing digital interactions, in opposition to a now obsolete paradigm of broadcasting communication, on media but also between companies and customers. Customers aren’t passive recipients of broadcast-like communication anymore, placing themselves in the growing category of produsers (Bruns, 2008), with their vast contribution to the daily massive production of user-generated content, and employees ask for organizational environments in which they can move, work and interact in the same way as they do in their daily life out of the office.
This digitalization phenomenon is not entirely new, since it has begun already years ago, but it constantly continues to grow taking on some particular characteristics: speed and pervasiveness (Gimpel and Röglinger, 2015). The evolution of computing hardware and connecting systems makes them every day more and more powerful and ubiquitous, and even progressively cheaper, thus allowing for their wider diffusion amongst people, and the consequent growth of the so called “network effect”, or the greater value that products or services acquire when more people use them.
The characteristic of pervasiveness well suits to the trend of diffusion of smart devices, mobile connections and web 2.0, but also refers to the process of digital change that expands to other departments in the organization besides the IT. Digitalization now applies also to all processes from marketing and sales, to customer care and human resources management, from administration to production, and so on.
Every aspect or field to which it is possible to apply some kind of digital technologies or which it is possible to digitize, transforms itself it in a series of information and data that are processable by computers, in a process known as datafication. Once the otherwise analogic information, coming from many different sources, becomes digital data, it
becomes also possible to analyse them obtaining insights on the people or processes that has generated them.
The idea of data itself has been argued to have some characteristics that are summed in the
“3 Vs” (sometimes also up to 6 Vs): data, and especially “big data”, are voluminous and massive when generated i.e. by automatic interactions, by machines or by streams coming from social networks; data can be various and heterogeneous, due to the many different sources it can come from. Potentially, everything is data: from standard spreadsheets and databases, to emails, photos and videos, social networks’ conversations and relationships, but also reviews from websites like Amazon and similar, or geolocation data, data coming from environmental sensors and many, many others. Plus, the data is very rarely well structured and ready to be mined, but rather it is often raw and unstructured and needing for homogeneization, organization and integration, and further challenges to these operations are posed by the great velocity with which data are generated, in some cases almost in a continuous stream and in real time.
There are situations in which this massive amount of data can be helpful, for example when specific machine learning algorithms and techniques are applied to complex problems to obtain predictive models as desired outputs; a large amount of training data is, in these cases, of great importance, or even necessary. In many other cases, the great velocity can represent an issue to be addressed properly to ensure the data is handled adequately fast and that this characteristic does not turn into a menace to an accurate data mining process.
On the other hand, real-time data can be particularly helpful to make valuable decisions and take quick actions that have the power to impact business strategy, provided that the organization has developed a good level of agility, the fundamental ability to adapt quickly to change (Kane et al., 2015).
Indeed, structural changes in the organization represent one of the four key dimensions of the Digital Transformation Framework by Matt et al., referring to the modifications in organizational structures, processes and skill sets necessary to cope with new technologies (Matt et al., 2015). The importance of a digital skill set, a digital mindset and the role of culture in the organization will be addressed in the first case study on Smart Working.
Considering the precious information and knowledge that can be derived from this data, it is undoubtedly a great opportunity to exploit for a vast range of applications in healthcare, entertainment and media, travel and tourism, design and manufacturing, retailing and distribution, learning and education, but also public relations, government and public administration. From here onward, some applications will be proposed and discussed.
Preliminary study on Smart Working: “Smart Working, Smart Learning: Skills And Competences In The Digital Era”
(This research has been accepted and presented at the XV International Conference in Commemoration of Professor Marco Biagi on Digital and Smart Work, Modena 20-21 March 2017)
New technologies are significantly reshaping not only productive processes and work organization, but also the labour market, which it has been observed to be oriented towards high-skilled workers able to perform tasks that cannot be fully substituted by automation, but rather complemented by it.
In the recent debate about the future of employment, the importance of acquiring new skills and competences by means of education and training has been repeatedly emphasized as one of the multiple solutions to what it is justifiably feared as technological unemployment due to automation.
How do these two perspectives find a meeting point in the field of smart working? This research wants to investigate the nature of requested competences, taking into account three different sources of data: European guidelines and Italian regulations on one side, direct experience of Italian companies investigated through interviews on the other, and a series of business cases analysed with a software for corpus analysis.
1. Background
At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, some of the most recent technologies are already having a strong impact on almost every aspect of our life – personal, social, professional – while some other disruptive changes are expected to happen in the next decade.
From an economic point of view, new technologies are significantly reshaping not only productive processes and work organization – both on company level and on industry level – but also the labour market and employment relationships. “Polarization” of the labour market has been recognized for the first time by Autor et al. in 2006 (Autor et al., 2006) referring to the pattern of increasing labour demand for high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of traditional medium-skilled jobs. The inequality in wage distribution reflects the difference in the task content of jobs (non-routine cognitive tasks and non- routine manual tasks) and consequently the worker’s skill level (Frey and Osborne, 2015).
Although it was first observed in the US, this pattern seems to be a global trend amongst the implications of job polarisation there is the risk of a general de-skilling of the population. It is indeed easier for workers to skill down towards low-wage occupations (e.g.
personal service) rather than skill up to take high-wage jobs, for which a longer and slower process of education and training is required.
As far as we know today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution can open to a whole new set of opportunities in all domains, but it is not free of risks. Some jobs are rapidly growing, some others are undergoing a transformation of the tasks and skills required to do them, and another substantial percentage of occupations falls in the high risk of computerisation category, meaning that the risk of unemployment is right behind the corner (Valenduc and Vendramin, 2016).
In many cases, computerisation does not necessarily mean that a computer, or robot or algorithm, can fully substitute a human being; the presence of the man will still be irreplaceable in most cases and will require new competences on behalf of the worker. This is only one reason why reskilling and upskilling is becoming crucial.
Without going that far in the future, we already can see how technologies are changing the way we work, reconfiguring work environments and arrangements, allowing e.g. co- working spaces, remote working, external collaborations through teleconferencing and, in general, favoring the “shift from fixed systems of production to a flexible, open-ended process of organizational development” (European Commission, 1997).
Flexibility is the keyword in almost every definition of Smart Working, which is a real trending topic since the publication of the draft law n. 2229 on “Negotiation adjustment of Smart Working methods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” earlier this February.
Smart Working is indeed defined as a “flexible way of working whose aim is productivity increase on one side, and work-life balance facilitation on the other” (translation from the original draft law of 28 January 2016 on Self-employment and Smart Working). The bill text continues explaining that the new organization implies that the worker can perform his/her tasks partly in the company premises, and partly outside, without a designated station (spatial flexibility), with the only limitation of the daily and weekly maximum scheduled hours (time flexibility). Another point underlines the possibility to use technological tools to carry out the work. This aspect may suggest the request of another kind of flexibility, connected with the workers’ ability of developing new competences, approaches and strategies in order to pursue the established goals and calibrated on the new tools they are expected to master.
The adoption of a Smart Working approach, even more if for productivity enhancement reasons, can not ignore both short term actions on re-training and re-skilling today’s workers and an accurate definition of skills for the future workforce. Some researches have been done on the effect of new technical advances – such as automation, big data, artificial intelligence etc. – on employment, job content and skills, and almost all of them agree on the importance of understanding the current skill base and forecasting skills requirements for future jobs. First partial results from in-depth analysis of these researches show that the skill set of the future workforce is changing; apart from basic skills such as ICT literacy, growing attention is paid to cognitive abilities (e.g. creativity), social skills (e.g. cooperation, empathy etc.) and problem solving skills, meanwhile physical abilities are anticipated to decline in importance (World Economic Forum, 2016).
Fig. 1 Demand for work-related skills. Source: Future of Jobs Survey, World Economic Forum
The aim of this work is to investigate the dimension of appropriate skills for working in flexible contexts and therefore to contribute in defining more precisely the set of skills
“smart” workers should possess or develop in order to efficiently and safely carry out their work in a digital environment.
The investigation starts with a deep analysis of official documents: the draft law of 28 January 2016 on Self-employment and Smart Working, the draft law of 3 February 2016
“Negotiation adjustment of Smart Working methods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”
(translation from the original Italian “DDL S. 2229 Adattamento negoziale delle modalità di lavoro agile nella quarta rivoluzione industriale”), and the previous Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning (2006/962/EC), which represent the basis to start from for further immersion in the research literature on digital economy, digital skills and employment trends.
The greater contribute of this research comes from the direct experience of Italian companies that are currently experiencing Smart Working both in their starting or advanced phases. Our methodology consists in individual semi-structured interviews with Chief Human Resources Officers that voluntarily accepted to collaborate providing their experience. Data analysis will be conducted both manually and with the aid of software in order to examine concepts related to competences and skills; all concepts will be further clustered in macro-themes from which we will outline a portrait of Smart Workers’ skills.
Results from this research will be hopefully useful not only for companies and businesses, but also for individuals to improve their employability and for governments to define educational paths and lifelong learning strategies that will help matching supply with demand.
2. Smart Working Through Official Papers
As for the legislative proposal of 29 January 2014, Smart Working is an innovative and simplified way of working based on a great flexibility in terms of working hours and workplace (Law proposal of 29 January 2014 “Disposizioni per la promozione di forme flessibili e semplificate di telelavoro”). From the beginning it applies to employed workers and later it has been extended to self-employed workers as well (Draft law of 28 January 2016 on “Self-employment and Smart Working” ). To draw a first portrait of smart workers, we can start by looking at the obligations that emerge from the draft law text, in which two main aspects are considered: data protection and confidentiality, and health and safety, both partially connected with the technological equipment. Both employer and employee are complementarily responsible for these issues, but from the exclusive point of view of the employee, specific knowledge and awareness on these issues are required. The worker should be conscious of opportunities enabled by the tools, but he should also be aware of the risks connected e.g. with confidential data management and internet connections; this implies there should be a basic knowledge of information systems and in general of the technological tools used for working.
Same thoughts are possible for what concerns safety at work, general risks and specific risks on which workers have to be informed in order to keep working in a safe and healthy way also outside of the company premises. This aspect may be taken for granted, but we pointed out that it keeps being taken into account by the employer, as we are going to underline later.
Additional mentions to key competences for Smart Working may be found in the draft law of 3 February 2016 mainly under the article n. 5 “Lifelong learning right and certification of competences” and article n. 7 on Digital Literacy (Draft law of 3 February 2016
“Negotiation adjustment of Smart Working methods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”). With these articles, to smart workers is recognized a lifelong learning right that represents the opportunity to keep growing professionally and to constantly update - and upgrade - the employment skills, which must be monitored and certified each 12 month
by the employer. Also, great importance is given to the improvement of digital knowledge, for which incentive and promotional measures are established, in order to encourage companies and employers towards investments focused on new working skills in accordance with technological and organizational changes.
The importance of this process of continuous learning has been previously stressed in the Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning. There are 8 competences that are “essential in a knowledge society and guarantee more flexibility in the labour force, allowing it to adapt more quickly to constant changes in an increasingly interconnected world”
(Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning) : communication 1) in the mother tongue and 2) in foreign languages; 3) mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology; 4) digital competence; 5) learning to learn; 6) social and civic competences; 7) sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; 8) cultural awareness and expression.
Some of these seem to be more applicable than others in the specific Smart Working sphere, such as:
• communication skill: to interact in appropriate ways depending on the context;
• digital skill: to have a “confident and critical use of information society technology (IST) and thus basic skills in information and communication technology (ICT)”;
• sense of initiative: or “ability to turn ideas into action. It involves creativity, innovation and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives”.
More key competence however will emerge from our investigation of companies that experimented with Smart Working in the previous months.
3. Smart Working Through Experiences Of Italian Companies a. Methodology
On the basis on what has been previously said, we reasonably assume that some specific skills for Smart Working do exist and that a smart worker profile could and should be outlined. We try to find evidence of this in the experience of various Italian realities that are experimenting – or already experimented – some periods of Smart Working with their employees. A first phase consisted of researches on the web in order to identify companies that were experimenting or implementing Smart Working projects and then identify the name and contact of related Project Managers. These preliminary researches have been integrated with word-of-mouth information from experts or professors that provided further names.
These persons have been contacted via formal e-mails to invite them to take part in the study and to ask for their availability for a brief interview. We received answers from 5 out of 7 contacted people that promptly expressed their willingness to participate.
Final simple of companies that accepted to take part in the research include two companies operating in the financial sector, one operating in the insurance sector, one pharmaceutical company and a company of digital services.
In all cases, we contacted and interviewed Project Managers from the HR departments that were responsible for the implementation of Smart Working in the organization.
Some interviews were then arranged by phone, some by VOIP tools like Skype, while the majority were conducted through traditional face-to-face meetings. The total length of all
interviews is of 4 hours approx., with and average length of 48 minutes; all interviews were audio recorded with participants’ explicit permission and later transcribed.
Table 1. List and duration of interviews with Project Managers Respondents Duration
Respondent 1 00:26
Respondent 2 01:01
Respondent 3 00:46
Respondent 4 01:26
Respondent 5 00:21
Total length 4 hours Average length 48 minutes
As the interviews were semi-structured, the number of question was not fixed, some questions may have been repeated or reformulated in slightly different ways from one respondent to another, but they were mainly of two types: general question to introduce the subject, and specific questions on Smart Working skills. Examples of general questions are:
“What does Smart Working means in this company?”, “How is it designed/how does it work in this company?”.
Specific or core questions were: “Are there jobs or positions that are more (or less) suitable than others for Smart Working? Why?”, “If you are experimenting Smart Working, do you feel like you would need to develop new skills?” and “Do you think new skills are needed for Smart Working and if yes, which ones?”.
These question may be followed by probing questions such as “Why?”, “How?” or “What do you mean...?” in order to get clarifications or better understand the purpose of some statements.
Each interview was closed with a brief summary of main key concepts that emerged during the discussion, and then by asking if something was missing or something else should be added.
b. Analysis
Interview transcripts were analysed to extract concepts connected to competences, and then all extracted concepts were grouped in main categories and labeled.
On a more general and descriptive point of view, all Smart Working projects taken into account are until now experienced as pilot tests that involve a limited number of participants chosen from a wider range of voluntary applications in response to a call opened by the HR Departments.
In some cases, application was open to all suitable roles from a contractual point of view, in some other cases a preliminary selection was made to limit the access only to roles that were considered more suitable from a job/tasks point of view. Anyway, respondents refer that further selections were made after spontaneous applications in order to have a representative sample of the whole company population.
At the question “Are there jobs or positions that are more (or less) suitable than others for Smart Working? Why?”, the answers were almost uniform in stating that potentially and
ideally all jobs are suitable to be done remotely in different places outside of the company premises, with the exception of more operative roles i.e. employees working in laboratories or in the manufacturing line of the pharmaceutical company.
Managers also set a limitation of a maximum number of days per week that employees can work in Smart Working; for all respondents, the limit is usually settled around 2-4 days per month.
c. Main Concepts
Technology in all cases represents the enabling factor that makes Smart Working possible. When intended as technological level of the company, technology accelerate the process in the sense that more the company is technologically developed, more the passage to Smart Working is smooth; when intended as technological tools and equipment (usually laptop and smartphone provided by the company), technology is something that equalize all the employees, enabling them to work remotely, to the extent that they are confident with the tools. Connected with technology is digital literacy, which usually is taken for granted since employees uses computers and other tools in the workplace as well, but some pilot tests highlighted how working from other places requires more tools e.g. to access a verified connection, or connecting through VPN, or using social collaboration platforms, virtual phones etc., and these tools are not always well-known, they may cause some difficulties or resistances.
“Immagino me a lavorare da casa, la produttività va a zero perché io con il computer so fare veramente poco e ho la possibilità qui dentro di chiamare un assistente piuttosto che un collega che mi dia una mano. Quindi anziché collegarlo a un fatto di profilo o di ruolo, lo collegherei più alla competenza specificatamente sviluppata da ciascuno. E’ chiaro, si dovranno dotare anche coloro che oggi sono meno competenti in termini di utilizzo di certi strumenti, li si dovrà dotare delle competenze per lo meno base per lavorare in una situazione di particolare autonomia o addirittura isolamento, perché nel momento in cui sei a casa e hai un problema da risolvere con il tuo iPad o laptop, ti sarà difficile attingere alle competenze dei tuoi colleghi che a casa tua non sono presenti.”
(I imagine myself working at home, [I imagine] productivity going down to zero because I’m able to do really few things with computers and here I have the possibility to call an assistant or a colleague to help me out. Instead of talking about profiles or roles, I would rather talk about skills specifically developed by each one. It is clear that we must equip also people who today are less competent with certain tools, we must equip them with basic skills in order to work autonomously or even alone, because when you are at home and you have a problem with your iPad or laptop, it will be difficult to benefit from your colleagues’ competences.)
“L’unica cosa più tecnica è l’uso dei device, però abbiamo scoperto che a volte non è la persona che non vuole usare il dispositivo, ma non le hanno insegnato a usarlo; la parte più hard di questa cosa è ‘non conoscevo le potenzialità di questo device, non sapevo che facesse anche questo, quindi non ci ho pensato ad usarlo così perché non lo so’. Quindi direi più conoscenze
hard rispetto alla tecnologia mentre tutto il resto mi sembrano più competenze soft.”
(The only technical thing is using devices, but we discovered that sometimes it’s not the individual who doesn’t want to use a device, but no one taught him how to use it; the hardest part is ‘I wasn’t aware of the device’s potential, I didn’t know it could do this or that, so I didn’t think about using it this way’. That’s why I would say we need more hard knowledge about technology, and the rest are soft skills.)
Digital literacy seems to be the core competence to acquire, mostly for non-millennials employees. For smart workers, but for future workers in general, is becoming essential to master ICT in general, to know and use different platforms, applications, devices and – last but not least – social media. The digital workplace is a huge opportunity for enterprises, and the ability to exploit these opportunities is the best asset of the worker.
Under the category of digital soft skills we may group a set of relational and behavioural traits that are again related to the use of the tools or to the context of remote working:
• virtual communication: is the ability to communicate effectively through different channels and to choose the right tool or channel depending on the situation:
“la capacità di comunicare, di scegliere come comunicare, con che strumento - che sia la mail, la telefonata... - bisogna saper scegliere lo strumento giusto per il contenuto e l’interlocutore. Se scrivo una mail e si sta parlando di una cosa tecnica, e io scrivo una mail lunga una pagina e mezza, la telefonata avrebbe predisposto meglio il collega a lavorare insieme”;
(...the ability to communicate, to choose how to communicate, with which tool - e- mail, phone calls... - it’s essential to choose the right tool for each content and speaker. If we are talking about a very technical issue and I write a very long e-mail, maybe a phone call would have been better for the colleague to work together.)
• collaboration: ability to work together with colleagues without the element of physical presence, to be easily reachable for colleagues and supervisors, to be able to share information and knowledge and to correctly give feedbacks about the work in progress:
“...riuscire a restare in contatto, collaborare con il proprio team anche se non ci si trova all’interno del proprio ufficio”
(...to succeed in keeping in touch, in collaborating with the team even when we are not in the office.)
• digital attitude: is the general openness to digital tools, the ability to keep learning and evolving with them, in opposition to a resistance attitude. It also includes awareness of the potential of the tools and of its risks as well:
“[...] è tutto il tuo approccio alla tecnologia, quindi non esiste ‘voglio fare lo Smart Working però le call non mi piacciono, non voglio farle, non accendo la telecamera...”
([...] it’s the attitude towards technology as a whole, so it’s impossible to say ‘I want todo Smart Working but I don’t like Skype calls, I don’t want to do it, I won’t turn on the webcam...)
“Io vedo colleghi che di fatto, potendo usufruire della strumentazione tecnica per poterlo fare, sono continuamente collegati; da loro arrivano mail a mezzanotte, all’una di notte, alle cinque del mattino...anzi sono fin troppo collegati, bisognerebbe dargli un galateo del collegamento...”.
(I see colleagues that are constantly connected through their tools and devices; I get e-mails from them at midnight, at 1 pm, at 5 am...they are too connected, someone should give them an etiquette of connection...)
Our respondents also mentioned some more general soft skills as problem solving, efficient work scheduling, time management and goal-centric thinking. This last skill, goal- centric thinking, is strongly related to what respondents refer to as “cultural” background.
Culture is so far the most stressed key concept, on which all companies are working hard.
All respondents mention some cultural values that have to be the very basis on which Smart Working can be implemented, and these values can only be reached through a long and challenging process of change management. Like all major changes, organizational change is rarely welcomed with excitement and does not proceed smoothly at first. This process of course should engage the organization at all levels, starting from top management, and should finally achieve some values like trust, goal-centric assessment, responsibility and autonomy, flexibility.
These values would then be embodied in 1) new leadership styles by managers, who trust their employees and switch from evaluating their physical presence to evaluating their achievements; and 2) new behaviors by smart workers, who are autonomous and flexible in organizing their work and managing their time, and responsible with regard to their goals.
“Un cambiamento forte sarà lo stile di leadership come capacità dei capi.
Fiducia, rapporto autonomia/responsabilità, ci spostiamo più su un piano relazionale e di mentalità.” – Respondent 1
(A strong change will affect leadership styles as managers’ skills. Trust, autonomy/responsibility relationship, it’s on the relational and mentality level.)
“Il vero problema sarà il problema dei nostri capi che sono ancora oggi assolutamente abituati ad avere il collega a portata di voce o di telefono, cioè lo chiamo e lui in 2 minuti è lì. La difficoltà psicologica è una difficoltà in qualche modo riconducibile al concetto di controllo che si ha all’interno delle organizzazioni, che è un concetto ancora molto militare che è quello di avere il collaboratore in carne ed ossa vicino a te.” – Respondent 2
(The true problem will be that our managers are still used to keep their colleagues on hand or on voice, that is I call him and he comes in two minutes.
There’s a psychological obstacle attributable to the idea of control within organizations, that is still “military”, that is to have your collaborator next to you in flesh and blood.)
“E’ un tema non scontato per le aziende italiane e tradizionali, quindi stiamo accompagnando le persone a ragionare in ottica un po diversa e accompagniamo soprattutto la fascia intermedia dei capi, che sono un pochino più resistenti a questa novità perché rimane un po’ l’idea che essere a
capo di una struttura significa controllare anche visivamente le persone.” – Respondent 3
(It’s not assumed for Italian and traditional firms, so we’re leading people to think differently, above all we’re leading the middle management, which is more resistant to this change, because there’s this idea that to manage people means also to control them.)
“La sperimentazione ha aiutato la fiducia e a far capire che se non ci facciamo vedere, ci siamo comunque e possiamo svolgere le stesse attività.” – Respondent 4
(The pilot test helped in trusting and in understanding that if we are not to be seen, we still are here and carrying out same activities.)
“Sul performance management raccontano di esser dubbiosi su quanto il capo sia capace di procedere ad una valutazione per obiettivi o invece conti di più quante ore hai fatto, che eri lì, che ti ha visto...Il cambiamento culturale qui è necessario da parte dei capi” – Respondent 5
([Employees] are hesitant regarding performance management and the ability of the manager to assess them on the basis of goals, or he still counts how many hours you worked, that you were in the office, that he saw you...Cultural change here is necessary from managers at first.)
The table below summarizes main findings obtained from the analysis of our interviews.
Table 2. List of specific competences grouped in categories
Categories of competences Culture
(behaviors) Digital literacy Digital soft skills General soft skills
Content
- Flexibility - Autonomy - Responsibility
- Basic ICT knowledge - Platforms - Applications - Devices - Social media
- Virtual
communication - Collaboration - Digital attitude
- Problem solving - Work
scheduling - Time
management - Goal-centric
thinking
4. Corpus-Based Analysis
Some further analysis were conducted on the corpus of interviews’ transcriptions, processed with a software for text analysis called AntConc (Anthony, 2015), a freeware corpus analysis toolkit developed by Laurence Anthony and freely downloadable from his website. For our analysis, we will use wordlist tool to obtain a list of all words used in a given corpus of documents ordered by frequency, in a way that words with the largest number of occurrences appear first, meanwhile the concordance tool shows all sentences in which a selected term occurs.
a. Main Results From Corpus Analysis
By means of the AntConc function wordlist, we obtained a list of most frequent words used in the interviews. The image below shows the first 100 most frequent words in the right column; the left column shows the ranking and the middle column displays the number of occurrences for the specific word. In order to obtain more relevant results, the corpus has been compared with a list of stop words containing grammar words such as articles and prepositions: the output shown below indeed contains mostly nouns, adjectives, pronouns, all related to the work and firm field, with our keyword “smart working” at the top.
Fig. 2 Output of AntConc wordlist analysis showing rank position (first column) of each word (third column) and its frequency (second column)
The most frequent word is work: the collocation tool tells us that it mostly appear in the expressions “working hours”, “workplace”, “agile work” (literal translation for “lavoro agile”, Italian expression for “smart working”), so all concepts connected to the context of Smart Working, but it also appears in expressions such as “work organization”, “work-life balance” and “safety at work”.
First thing to notice is that employees are almost exclusively referred to as “people”
(frequency 61, position 4), “colleagues” (freq. 43) and “collaborators” (freq. 16), while the noun “employees” is less frequent (position 67, freq. 12).
Collocation of our second keyword skills (position 9) shows that a great number of occurrences can be collocated in the interviewer’s questions, meanwhile occurrences in respondents’ answers usually appear in expressions such as “soft skills”, “behavioral skills”,
“skills of the manager” and “technological or IT skills”. Results are similar for the word
“capabilities” which is associated with behavior, communication, work planning and organization, goal-centric thinking and soft capabilities. Other references to skills can be detected between position 80 and 100, with words collaboration (freq. 10) and communication (freq. 10) with specific reference to the ability to communicate and collaborate in different environments, through virtual platforms and various tools.
It is also interesting to note the different frequency of goals (freq. 32) and goal (freq. 12).
Examining their collocations, it is possible to note that the plural form it’s used to talk about the importance for smart workers to set specific goals, to share them with colleagues and supervisors and to organize their work in order to achieve such shared goals. The same word used in its singular form still has some occurrences that refer to goal-centric thinking, but in most cases the word is used to talk about the general aims the firm intend to reach by experimenting or implementing Smart Working. By looking at the words in their context, it is possible to affirm that organizations’ main aim is usually productivity growth, work-life balance improvement and general organizational innovation.
There are some other frequent words that are worth considering in this output, i.e. culture, trust, assessment, autonomy and change. Three respondents out of five named the importance of trust and autonomy in the context of new working organizations; while on one side smart workers are required to be more autonomous in setting goals and organizing their work, on the other side supervisors and manager have to develop a trusting attitude towards their collaborators, alongside with the ability to assess people’s performance on the basis of reached goals.
All respondents stressed out the need of a different organizational culture (freq. 14), that would consider all values above mentioned, and this need is confirmed again by looking at the collocation of words cultural and change, that in most of the occurrences appear together (“cultural change”), and in one case it refers to “change in leadership styles”.
5. Conclusions
Through complementary analysis of official documents and interviews, we managed to sketch the ideal portfolio of competences for the smart worker, and we think this can apply to “future workers” in a broader way. What emerged from interviews’ interpretation has been further confirmed by objective analysis conducted with a software.
It seems that some skills and knowledge can be autonomously developed by the worker through experience or education, e.g. digital competences tied to ICT, devices and platforms, but some other behaviors and soft skills can only be triggered in a particular organizational context that culturally shares and encourages values of flexibility, autonomy, and collaboration towards goals.
Workers’ skills upgrade and learning go hand in hand with a broader organizational change from a traditional, rigid and hierarchical system to a more fluid, flexible, informal one. A main challenge in this process of change rely on management levels, which have to work on their leadership approach with regard to performance assessment and relationship with colleagues: the physical absence of the worker won’t affect negatively his performance assessment if there is mutual trust and if such assessment is carried out on the basis of achieved goals and not on how many hours the worker spends in his office.
It is difficult to let go of the traditional idea of control over the human resources, this is why it is believed that still some attempt of control is going to be disguised in Smart Working processes – e.g. considering how much goals are actually established together or how much employees’ digital actions can be tracked – but hopefully with time and hard work the organizational innovation process can be fully completed and measured.
Future researches should precisely consider the aspect of measure and monitoring in order to fully understand tangible benefits that keep motivating companies to innovate their structure and working relations, and also investigate deeply what potential risks are and their prevention could be.
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA &SOCIAL COLLABORATION TOOLS
In the last few years, Web 2.0 technologies have been both the driving force and the tools for a growing digitization of business processes (Markovitch and Willmott, 2014; Bughin et al., 2009; Bughin et al., 2010; Bughin et al., 2013), with most impact registered in areas of communication with external players, such as public relations, customer relationship management, marketing and sales (Bughin et al., 2015), given that higher benefits can be observed when enterprises are “fully (externally and internally) networked” (Bughin et al., 2010). Fully networked enterprises use Web 2.0 technologies not only to interact with customers and partners, but also to improve communication and collaboration between employees. In particular, most used Web 2.0 technologies are so called Enterprise Social Platforms, intended as an integrated environment that combines different functions like user profiles, blogs, wikis, communities, social groups, microblogging tools, document sharing tools and so on, which use is limited to employees and for work purposes (Holtzblatt et al., 2013). Leonardi et al. (Leonardi et al., 2013) give a definition of enterprise social tools from a communicative point of view, that is especially considering their function of digital platform on which communicative interactions occurs, both between external (e.g., customers) and internal (e.g., employees) entities. Since interactions become visible and explicit to everyone and persistent in time on these platforms; these characteristics represent a great opportunity for people in the workplace and for the organization itself to increase and improve social learning and knowledge sharing, which may potentially and positively impact on business performance.
Case study #1: “Social Technologies for the Workplace: Metrics Proposal for Adoption Assessment”
(Based on R. De Michele, T. Fabbri, C. Canali, “Social Technologies for the Workplace: Metrics Proposal for Adoption Assessment”, 4th EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good (Goodtechs 2018), 28-30 Novembre 2018, Bologna, Italia. ACM Press.)
As Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly being implemented for business purpose, they offer a wide range of opportunities and potential benefits for the enterprises that internally adopt digital social platforms. However, enterprises are usually not able to correctly and effectively evaluate their investments along this direction.
According to Gartner, indeed, “many large companies are embracing internal social networks, but for the most part, they’re not getting much from them” (Burégio et al., 2010).
This is the reason why, after the growing interest in social tools registered over the last few years and their subsequent implementation within the workplace, it becomes now necessary to identify new metrics that allow leaders and executives and decision makers to evaluate and measure the impact of such technologies, to understand how they are perceived within the company and which ones are more effective in triggering the interest and the participation of the employees. Traditional metrics, proposed by literature and deriving from sophisticate and advanced application of various techniques (Matthews et al., 2013; Lithium Technologies, 2011; Muller et al., 2012; Agostino and Sidorova, 2016), like network analysis (Smith et al., 2009; Helms and Buijsrogge, 2005), have been only recently applied to this context, but there is the need for innovative analyses and metrics to better support decision makers in evaluating the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and social tools when they are at their first stage of implementation within the company. To fill this gap, in this research we propose two metrics to assess adoption and potential benefits of these tools.
Specifically, we consider Participation Rate (PR) in social tools as a measure of technologies adoption, discerning between active and passive user participation, and a new metric called Return on Effort (RoE) to evaluate the spreading benefit of internal social tools, based on how many people actually access and benefit from resources produced by other users. Two case studies are presented where the proposed metrics are applied to real data coming from enterprises that recently adopted internal digital platforms including social tools for collaboration and communication among employees.
The application of the proposed metrics highlights significant differences among the social tools being part of the platforms and gives insights to the management about their potential effectiveness in terms of adoption and benefits.
1. Related Work
Digitalization of companies is a step further the mere automation of existing processes in an organization, since it implies the complete redesign of some processes, together with related roles, skills, structures and even business models (Markovitch and Willmott, 2014).
Digitalization is also characterized by the generation of great amounts of data that can be automatically gathered for further analysis and mining, and that can provide with useful and real-time insights on a wide range of aspects, from consumers’ behavior to employees’
satisfaction, knowledge sharing, process performance, evaluation of costs or risks and so on.
Quite much literature on the topic underlines the positive impact and the opportunities of Web 2.0 technologies for business: as an example, McKinsey surveys show a high percentage of companies affirming they do benefit in various way by implementing such technologies. Some listed benefits include improvements in marketing and sales strategies, lower costs, better communication and knowledge sharing, higher customer satisfaction and consequently also higher revenues.
Turban et al. (Turban et al., 2011) focus specifically on enterprise social networking, whether it be the company’s presence on public social networking sites (Facebook or LinkedIn) or their adoption of tools for the exclusive use of employees (i.e. IBM Lotus Connections), identifying opportunities such as better communication and dissemination of information and knowledge, enhancement of collaboration, innovation and learning and better management.
Although various studies, including (Kwahk and Park, 2010), proved that the implementation of social media increased participation in the knowledge sharing and decision-making processes, consequently boosting job performance, some others warn about the fact that while investments in Web 2.0 technologies are increasing, still there aren’t so many demonstrations that these technologies add value to enterprise operations or do have a positive ROI (Burégio et al., 2010). Moreover, enterprises register a general difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of their investments.
To overcome this need for insights, authors in (Matthews et al., 2013) for example developed a specific tool for community leaders that provides actionable analytics on business communities, based on interviews with leaders about their needs. They expressed interest in evaluating three different community aspects – people, content and participation – and on the basis of these, specific metrics have been developed to assess community health, i.e. post value, top contributors, overall activity etc.
The study of (Lithium Technologies, 2011) defines an index for assessing community health using parameters that refer to community growth, usefulness, popularity, reactivity, interactivity and vitality. While particularly important for communities of interaction with customers, these metrics are less applicable to business internal communities in which, for example, a growing membership has less or no sense when the access is restricted to company employees.
Parameters and metrics to consider may vary considerably depending on the type of community, but also and primarily on business goals. (Muller et al., 2012) observed indeed that same metrics, lead to different results in term of Human, Intellectual and Relational Capital depending on the type of community (i.e. Community on Practice, Team, Technical Support, Idea Lab, Recreation).
When considering blog tools, Efimova and Grudin (Efimova and Grudin, 2007) show that the use of internal blogs can improve the individual employee performance by accelerating the information flow, and can also improve company reputation and customer engagement;
these results are confirmed by further studies by (Huh et al., 2007) and (Jackson et al., 2007) on IBM’s internal blogging system.
Using survey data about intraorganizational microblogging systems, (Sun and Shang, 2014) confirm that social-related use of enterprise social media can attract employees to use a platform and thus increase the likelihood of using it for work-related purpose as well.
Conversely, since employees may feel frustrated if they invested time in social media and received little or no perceived return on investment (Yardi et al., 2009), Muller (Muller et al., 2009) suggested a ROC (Return On Contribution) metric to measure the performance of several types of social media where ROI is more difficult to calculate and it is the ratio of the number of people who benefit from a resource divided by the number of people who
