Teleworking is proving to be a very popular academic research field in Italy (at least forty theses are now in preparation at various universities), but as yet the concept has not fully entered the political and economic agenda. Recent surveys suggest that only about a third of Italian companies, even in economically developed areas, know about telework. The number prepared to consider telework themselves is a very small percentage.
Nevertheless a number of large companies (mainly in the IT and telecoms field) have signed collective agreements with trade union organisations, and are implementing limited telework programmes for their employees. The list includes Saritel, Italtel, Telecom Italia, Dun & Bradstreet, Digital and Seat. In September 1996 and in 1997 general national collective agreements were signed between employers and trade union bodies for the IT sector and for the Service and Commerce sector. The text of the agreements are available on the Internet (http://www.cgil.it/fiom/telelav).
Currently, it is estimated that these collective agreements on telework affect about 300-500 teleworking employees. But the number of teleworkers in IT companies is larger: IBM has about 4,000 employees (mainly mobile staff) using ICT in the field, though the company prefers not to describe them as teleworking. Digital and Telecom Italia also have a large mobile field staff equipped with portable PCs, GSM phones and modems. Telework is growing fast specially in SMEs, where innovative firms find telework particularly suited for exploring new business opportunities, like in the case of Logos, a translation firm.
In 1996 the City Government of Rome, in association with ECTF - Italy, run the first telework experiment in the public sector. Under the Tra.De (Traffic Decongestion) project, 35 employees worked part time from home and from a telecentre located on the outskirts of the city. The experiment, limited to 3 months, give many positive results and telework is now considered by Government as a suitable option for the delocalisation of public services.
| Logos "More than mere words": this title introduces the Internet site of Logos (http://www.logos.it), a firm that provides translation services. Logos is a Modena-based company but is now essentially multinational. Its peculiar feature, which secured its commercial success and turned it into an excellent example of telework, is the fact that since 1979 it has made full use of the available technologies (fax at first, and now Internet) to organise its work at a distance. Today Logos is one of the world's ten leading translation agencies, with 1,200 translators in every corner of the earth and covering a total of more than twenty languages. The translators are outside collaborators, who are paid a fee according to work actually done, while the number of full-time employees now stands at about twenty. Quality and flexibility are the characteristics that have enabled Logos to acquire
about 5,000 clients all over the world. The fact that they have translators in every
country of the world enables them to accept translation from and into every language. The
quality of the service rendered by their external collaborators is controlled by a
centralised data base that stores every document, job and translated word, and also
contains information about the translators, their certified experience level, fields of
specialisation, language combinations, and the clients for whom they have worked. |
The not-for-profit organisation Lavoro & Tecnologia (Work and Technology) has been one of the main bodies promoting the concept of telework in Italy. In 1996, it established a telework web site (http://www.mclink.it/telelavoro), and also runs an active e-mail discussion list which currently has approaching 450 subscribers. From this initiative has sprung five virtual telework projects involving 50 people.
Among other activities, Lavoro & Tecnologia organised a conference in October 1996 in the Italian Parliament building, to discuss a draft Stimulation of Telework law. Over 200 people attended, and the event attracted attention both from politicians and from the media. The proposed law, originally written by a team of experts and teleworkers, is actually under consideration in the Committee on Work and Productive Activities of the Chamber of Deputies. The text of the proposal is available on the Internet at http://www.mclink.it/telelavoro/law.
Another organisation, SIT (Societa' Italiana Telelavoro - http://telelavoro.technapoli.interbusiness.it), is an association founded by Olivetti and S3 Acta, with individual members from consulting companies and large firms interested in discussing and implementing telework.
A number of telecentres are now under development in the cities of Rome (the opening is scheduled in September 1997: see box below), Bologna and Venezia. There are also two telecentres already in operation in a small villages, Castelnuovo ne' Monti and in Piacenza, where 8 employees of Caridata work for their office in Milan. However, these ventures are still relatively unknown.
| Rome Nexus Telecentres Following a year of joint study, the Municipality of Rome and STET, on 18 March 1996, signed Rome Nexus, a framework agreement for cabling the city with an investment of 2000 billion lire. In this general context it is proposed to set up 57 telecentres at the focal access points of the city and to place them at the disposal of public and private enterprises of the Rome metropolitan area. These 57 centres, which have been dubbed "the gates of Rome", have been identified on the basis of a study of the traffic flows in the city and located at the points were this traffic was found to be particularly intense. The project conceives the telecentres as performing not only linkage functions between the city's social and productive realities, but also as a provider of new technologies for telework and of assistance for the growth of small-scale entrepreneurial activities within the city. The approach, therefore, is not merely the reductive one of constituting an
appropriately equipped centre where businesses can avail themselves of the new
technologies, but also seeks to turn them into open polyfunctional structures for
diffusing the new technologies and assisting and promoting the creation of new
enterprises. The first pilot centre is scheduled to come into operation in September 1997.
It will constitute a place of experimentation and verification, but also an example
intended to stimulate and promote more telework. |
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