Workplace Innovation in Swedish Local Organizations - Technology Aspect

Abstract

Workplace innovation (WI) is important to provide better work opportunities and increase productivity. WI at the individual task level concerns the structure of individual work tasks. A number of surveys have been done that measured WI at the individual task level, however they paid little attention to work environment, in particular to supportive technology. This paper presents the case study of WI in two Swedish organisations with focus on the alignment of ICT and the individual work tasks. We carried out seven interviews of workers at different levels of job and in different sectors. The qualitative data analysis identified four themes: business processes, working roles, data sources, and technology. The analysis was facilitated by constructing BPMN (Business Process Model Notation) diagrams for the identified business processes. We discovered that the supportive technology in the organisations is adequate but downright traditional. We argue that technology is an important factor and enabler for WI. Finally, we present an architectural model that provides a direction for future work on WI taking ICT as the basis.