Avoiding Digital Bottlenecks: Information Use Variation within Organizations

Continuous information flow is the core of digital transformation, where systems are integrated to limit data duplication. Still, there is a lack of studies on the intra-firm information use variance. Just as a firm’s output is limited by its capacity bottleneck, we suggest there are digital bottlenecks in firms and a method to identify them. We analyzed 1118 survey records of employees in 88 small and medium companies of the manufacturing sector collected between 2018 and 2023, where each respondent declared affiliation with one business division within their organization. The variance analysis reveals significant differences between the level of use of the maintenance division and several others, notably accounting, planning, and technology management. A visual analysis at the individual firm level is also presented. It allows to identify digital bottlenecks and could be used in the first step of the development of a diagnostic tool.