Information and communication technologies in enterprises

In 2012, 95.7% of enterprises with 10 persons employed has a Internet connection; in many economic sectors have been reached saturation levels.

The 93.6% of companies is connected to the Internet via fixed or mobile broadband, but only 26% of businesses connected to the Internet uses nominal speeds of10 Mbit/s or more; in terms of diffusion of the mobile broadband usage, 11.3% of the persons employed are provided by the enterprises with devices for a mobile broadband connections to the Internet.

The 64.5% of businesses has a website, but only 10.6% of these sites provides online ordering or reservation or booking service to users.

The 46.6%% of enterprises provide staff with portable devices that allow a mobile connection to the Internet for business use.

In 2011, 83.5% of companies have made use of information services offered online by the Public Sector (eGovernment) and 88.5% of enterprises use an intermediary to interact (on-line or off-line) with Public Administrations.

The interaction with third parties’ (other businesses, banks, PA) information systems is automatic for 60% of enterprises.

The 54% of enterprises share internally information relating to purchases and sales of the company among the business functions with IT applications or software.

E-commerce is made by 37.5% of enterprise.  Only 6.2% sells online own goods or services accounting for 6.4% of on-line sales out of the total one.

Regarding with eSkill, one enterprise out seven use internal ICT specialists while one out four retrieves ICT specialists outside.

The gap between small and large enterprises is still very pronounced and it is more than 30 percentage points in activities such as using ICT specialists, mobile broadband connections, the online submission of completed forms to the PA, the electronic exchange of information in standard format, use of specific software (like ERP) to share data internally, e-commerce.

In last recent years, Italian companies have gradually increased adoption of basic ICT improving types of Internet connection (percentage of enterprises using fixed broadband Internet connections increases from 83% in 2009 to 91.5% in 2012) and with them also on-line relationships with other external actors such as the P.A. (percentage of companies that directly send filled in forms via Web raised from 46% to 53%).

However slower is the diffusion of automation in exchanges of information with business suppliers or customers (from 21% in 2009 to 23% in 2012) and also the adoption of specific software for the use of customer information with other functional areas to purposes of analysis and marketing (from 13% in 2009 to 17% in 2012).

The opportunity to sell online was caught by some specific sectors such as publishing (from 22.6% in 2009 to 53.6% of the 2012 companies that sell online their services) and accommodation activities (from 39% to 46.7%).