Organizational change and productivity growth: an empirical analysis of the Italian insurance industry

Research into the relationship between investments in IT and increased productivity growth has so far produced ambiguous results, although it has demonstrated a clear relationship between investments in technology and organizational changes. In this context, the present article, using Italian insurance companies as examples, intends to highlight the ways in which combined investments in IT and organizational changes are able to influence productivity, thus allowing some of the limitations of traditional bureaucratic organizational forms to be overcome. The results obtained show how the use of IT allowed insurance companies to achieve organizational models characterized by new methods of centralization and sharing of technical and market knowledge. Through IT, such knowledge has been codified, standardized, and made available to all members of the organization, regardless of their ability to fully understand the technical aspects. The resulting organizational model is characterized by a polarization of the structures around two types of competencies: a core of technical experts and a multiplicity of sales channels. The advantages to productivity derive from the unbundling of these two types of knowledge within the organization, which has allowed new scale economies to be achieved, from a reduction of control costs, investments and duplications, to the exploitation of new forms of complementary relationships among the assets of insurance companies and those of other organizations.