A comparative assessment of digital transformation in Italy

It’s universally accepted that to thrive, enterprises must embrace transformation through technology. CIOs are at the forefront of this as they help shepherd their organizations through digitalization.

“Digital is a powerful business lever,” says Alessandra Luksch, director of the Digital Transformation Academy Observatory at Politecnico di Milano, which has been mapping trends in ICT spending by Italian organizations since 2016. “In large companies, the digital journey is well underway, especially in the digital, media, and finance sectors.

In other industries, and mostly in SMEs, digital transformation can happen in a non-organic way through piecemeal projects. But until there’s a change in corporate will and the CIO’s vision combines with other management to drive a full-scale project, success can only be measured by the strength of the corporate culture.

“I believe that change management is a fundamental issue every CIO has to deal with,” says Andrea Roero, global CIO of Molteni, a household name in Italian designer furniture companies.

Lucio D’Accolti, CIO of AMA, the in-house company of the City of Rome in charge of waste collection and management, and street cleaning, agrees. “The challenge of digital transformation projects lies not so much in the technological implementation, but in the operational change required of people and the entire business organization,” he says.

The data platform and digital twin

AMA is among many organizations building momentum in their digitization. The company has been a public utility since 2000, with the City of Rome as its sole shareholder. AMA employs about 7,600, serves a catchment area of nearly 2.5 million people, and operates in an area seven times the size of Milan, from which it collects more than 1.5 million tons of waste annually. This is the basis for a complex digital transformation project, which the company recently accelerated with the arrival of new GM Alessandro Filippi and, shortly after, new CIO D’Accolti, ahead of the 2025 Jubilee, when 50 million visitors are expected in Rome during a series of pilgrimages.

D’Accolti outlined his action plan followed by initiatives to implement in preparation for the Jubilee. He then moved to the technology procurement part, in accordance with the new Procurement Code on the Consip platform, which allows projects to proceed quickly in accordance with principles of a transparent, sustainable, and digital public administration. From there, the actual digitization project can be implemented.

“We started with an evolution of the CRM to manage the citizen relationship, and the various requests and reports: those who come into contact with the AMA must be recognized on any channel and receive consistent answers in a multichannel perspective,” he says. “Plus, we’re building a digital twin of Rome so the situation of our assets on the ground — namely the 600,000 waste bins — can be updated in real time based on alerts. Therefore, we can directly alert our colleagues on their smartphones for possible interventions. Finally, the flow of AMA reports and activities generates a lot of data for the SAP system, and to be more effective, we’ll start managing it with data and business intelligence.”

In fact, AMA collects a huge amount of structured and unstructured data from bins, collection vehicles, facilities, and user reports, and until now, this data has remained disconnected, managed by disparate systems and interfaces, through Excel spreadsheets. So the digital transformation involves gradually moving to the new data platform to collect and aggregate data from the data lake with business Information modelling systems, and then putting it on dashboards and performing analysis with business intelligence.

“The goal is to correlate all types of data that affect assets and bring it all into the digital twin to take timely action,” says D’Accolti.

Digital transformation: BI, AI, and the metaverse

IT as a business partner is the vision that Roero has brought to Molteni to implement a complete digital transformation that includes a change in corporate culture.

“The CIO has to add value to the business; he isn’t just the IT manager, managing servers and networks and associated costs,” Roero says. “The CIO is an information and innovation officer, driving implementations that have direct value for business growth. His strategic contribution means, for example, creating and facilitating process efficiencies, and new lines of business and revenue streams.

Gruppo Molteni has been a model of Italian excellence in the world of high-end furniture for 80 years, but the future growth of the business through digitalization is very recent. The owners, CEO, and CIO have launched a review of the operating model in which the technology implementations fit. The project will be completed in the next few years and consists of elements around management software, workflow digitization, data analysis, and AI, AR, and VR applications.

“There are different methods and systems across companies and geographical regions, and a lot of emails, PDF files, and even sheets of paper are still used to create, share, and store information,” Roero says. “So we’re committed to completing the digitization of workflows in order to make a real leap in efficiency. Unifying processes means standardizing the reading of the business and paving the way for organic and inorganic growth.”

Another element of the digital strategy is a more significant use of BI to analyze and visualize data. Roero is also considering introducing AI to make processes more fluid and controlled, and the company data-driven.

“For a company like Molteni, it doesn’t mean adopting ChatGPT, a solution that has generated a lot of enthusiasm but isn’t currently useful for our business case,” he says. “We’re looking at established AI technologies that allow us to streamline internal processes, create a lean back office and lean production management, and verify workflows.

The sales channel is also a component of transformation, with virtual and augmented reality, using Oculus Quest and metaverse applications for product configuration on the web. “The goal is not true e-commerce, which is very difficult for the type of product we sell,” Roero says, “but a more effective model of online channel management.”

Linking the digital journey and change management

In Molteni’s complex digital transformation project, the focal point, similar to AMA, is the strengthening of digital culture, which is still not widespread in company units.

Change management is the real heart of digital transformation, even before technologies. For example, in Molteni’s new contract management business, or the design and implementation of projects for large customer orders, the ability to audit and map the entire supply chain is essential. “It’s a question of combining processes, culture, and technology to achieve an omnichannel operating model of the future,” says Roero.

AMA’s change management activities aim to attract experienced big players in the private world, and learn about best practices of their CIOs and take cues to operationalize. “The next step will be program management activities to learn how to deal with complex and ambitious programs, helping people not only understand how to work with new technology tools, but also to share the strategic direction of the company and manage vendors more consciously,” says D’Accolti.

According to recent data from the Digital Transformation Academy Observatory, 55% of companies with more than 250 employees choose training as the first method to introduce a new mindset on digital and innovation in the company. Then 52% say they act first on managers, trying to shape a new leadership style in which managers value their resources differently, move away from traditional control and leave room for goal-oriented work, and consider each person a possible source of innovation, Luksch points out, “Innovation has fast times and is unpredictable, and managers need to be able to bring a spirit of entrepreneurship to teams,” she says, “Anyone can introduce innovation.”

Data also shows that 35% of large companies practice change management through activities such as action learning, competitions, and internal hackathons to formulate new ideas, while 24% send employees to work with startups. “In the latter case,” says Luksch, “it’s a very effective form of change management because it’s an alternative experience to the usual work that develops not only skills but a strong sense of commitment.”

This commitment to the business is inescapable. Without it, digital transformation is destined to remain unfinished, because if it’s the CIO who designs, implements, and manages it, it’s all the people in the company who have to implement and maintain it, day after day.