ON ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ADDRESSING

THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

Silvia Schacht and Alexander Maedche

Enterprise Information Systems, University of Mannheim, L15 1-6, 68131 Mannheim, Germany

Keywords: Demographic Change, Changing workforce, Demographic-centric information systems.

Abstract: The demographic change influences almost all area of life such as health care, education, social systems and

productivity of companies. Therefore, appropriate adjustments to an aging society are necessary. To date,

many studies have been carried out weighting the advantages and disadvantages of the various alternatives.

The impact of an older workforce on productivity when using enterprise information systems was

considered only sparsely. The following paper presents our research intention to design and develop EIS

referring to the demographic change.

1 INTRODUCTION

If I had my way, I wouldn’t have any engineers over

35 years old on my project.” This kind of statements

from managers reflects a growing concern about the

aging workforce due to the demographic change

taking place in each developed country. The reasons

for these concerns are mostly negative stereotypes

associated with elderly. For instance, it is often

argued that older employees are disillusioned,

discouraged and depressed, and have difficulties in

understanding and using new information

technologies and systems.

However, an older workforce may have some

opportunities like company-wide networks and

invaluable experience, which are rarely considered

by the management. Today, employees with such

skills are called knowledge workers. A workforce

that consists in a large part of knowledge workers

can form a significant competitive edge to

companies because of their experiences and

networking skills. This competitive advantage may

be lost when the knowledge worker is leaving the

organization by reason of a new job or even for

retirement. Thus, companies have to face the

challenges bred by the demographic change.

This paper provides an overview and a statement

about our research on the impact of the demographic

change and the needs to adapt and extend enterprise

information systems (EIS) for elderly. The paper is

structured as follows. Section 2 illustrates major

changes on companies’ environment in more detail.

The third section provides an overview on relevant

related work. Section 4 outlines the primary research

questions we identified. Finally, section 5 presents a

summary of our future research activities.

2 MAJOR CHANGES

Since people are working together in organizations,

working conditions are constantly changing. Main

changes are the demographic change, the shift in

type of work and the globalization driven by new

technologies, information systems (IS) and Web 2.0

applications. The following section discusses these

changes in more detail.

2.1 Demographic Change in Workforce

The current demographic change resulting in an

aging population, presents a key challenge to

societies and companies in many countries around

the world. Between 2004 and 2050 the average age

in the EU will increase from 39 to 49 years, while

the number of people younger than 65 years will

continue to decline. Therefore, in 2050 an old age-

dependency ratio (number of people older than 65

divided by the number of people between 15 and 65)

of 53% is anticipated.

Fertility, mortality, and migration are identified

as the main drivers of the demographic change. In

2005, there was an average fertility rate of 1.5 births

per women in the European countries. For a full

456

Schacht S. and Mädche A. (2010).

ON ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ADDRESSING THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Information Systems Analysis and Speciﬁcation, pages

456-459

DOI: 10.5220/0002900504560459

 SciTePress

replacement of generations, however, a fertility rate

of at least 2.1 is needed resulting in a shrinking

population. The reduced mortality in early life will

result in an increased life expectancy of about five

years by 2050. The population is not only shrinking,

but also aging. Migration is identified as the major

determinant slowing the trend of demographic

change. If the number of migrations will stay at the

same level, a further increase of the working age

population is expected until 2030. This growth will

reach its peak in 2030 and thenceforward the

number of working age people will decline

(European Commission, 2007).

2.2 Changing Type of Work

Since industrial revolution the type of work in

organizations is subject to many changes because of

the continuous development of technologies like

new machines, innovative ways of working and new

demands on the workforce skills. At that the

industrial revolution, work was characterized as

repetitive, supervised, administrative and process

driven (Erlich & Bichard, 2008). By excessive

dividing tasks into sub-problems, employees could

be encouraged to maximize the production speed by

specialization. But the limits of productivity gains

were achieved very quickly. Afterwards, the

development of organizational psychology led to the

realization of surplus value of an independent-

minded employee, who analyzes and solves

problems on their own initiative. These employees

developed to experts in various fields producing,

exchanging and using information to perform their

work. They evolved to knowledge workers, whose

type as well as their way of work are highly

impacted by emerging information and

communication technologies. Today the role and

ratio of knowledge workers in relation to the manual

workers becomes more and more vital for

organizations (Erlich & Bichard, 2008).

2.3 Globalization

Globalization is a phenomenon that has been taking

place more or less intensively since the age of

exploration in the 15

century. Often, globalization

is described as the integration of economies,

societies and cultures through a globe-spanning

network for trade, communication and execution of

work. The last wave of globalization, which has

been occurred in the 1990s, was affected by

technological developments of the WWW, workflow

software, supply chaining, etc. and enabled

individuals and groups to collaborate and compete

globally (Friedman, 2005).

Together with the adoption of new information

technologies (ITs), ISs developed from loosely

interfaced “islands of automation” to a competitive

edge of companies. This introduction of corporate

technologies represents the first wave of

productivity increase driven by technological

developments. The second wave of productivity

enhancement is promoted by new collaboration and

communication systems that enable the knowledge

sharing and cooperation between people all over the

world. Therefore, companies are increasingly aware

of their significance, today (Chui et al., 2009).

3 RELATED WORK

For a long time companies ignored the consequences

of the demographic change despite many statistics

from researchers and governmental institutions. But

assuming older employees were really less

productive, companies have to face the challenge of

an aging workforce, now.

There are many studies from several disciplines

like social psychology or medical science, which

examined how performance differs by age. In their

meta-analysis (Waldman & Avolio, 1986) figure

out, that there is only a slightly negative impact of

age on job performance. In fact, they reveal a

performance increment with increasing age.

However, other researchers like (Crépon et al.,

2002) or (Dalton & Thompson, 1971) discover an

inverted u-shaped curve of employees’ performance

in relation to their age. Furthermore, there is done

much work ((Goudswaard, & deNanteuil, 2000),

(Drucker & Berki, 1992)) in understanding the

impact of different requirements for working and

employment conditions on the productivity of

company’s workers. But, these studies were very

general referring to various types of employees

without considering their usage of ISs or new

technologies.

With regard to new technologies and ISs, there

are several studies ((Aula & Käki, 2002), (Meyer et

al., 1997), (Stronge et al, 2006)), which analyze the

usage behavior of older people in dealing with

internet search engines. They figure out that older

people have more difficulties and need more time to

fulfill search tasks than younger participants. But the

participants of such studies are mostly older than 65

years and usually have little or no experience in

dealing with computers or software applications.

There is little work investigating the usage

ON ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ADDRESSING THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

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behavior of older employees in using ISs.

(Chadwick-Dias et al., 2002) analyze the overall

performance of users based on various measurement

categories considering the different web experiences

of older employees. The researchers examined a

positive correlation between age and overall

performance. Often older people need more time and

are less successful in task completion than their

younger counterparts. Experience has also a positive

correlation on the user performance. The more

experienced the people are the higher is their

performance. However, the size of the text has no

significant effect on the performance of all

participants.

4 RESEARCH ISSUES

Due to an aging workforce companies are forced to

significant adjustments to their corporate culture and

personnel management. Not only strategic changes

such as support of the elderly through training or

new personnel and wage policies are necessary.

There also has to be conducted an adaptation on ISs

to the needs of the new “old workforce”.

We divided our research into two major streams:

Firstly, we start with an examination of the needs of

older workers in their working environment, where

we try to understand real-world demands of elderly

regarding ISs by running field studies including

interviews and observations. Secondly, we will

create design-driven solutions by customizing EISs

to the needs of elderly and developing next-

generation platforms to involve former employees

and retirees into the day-to-day business of

companies.

4.1 Understanding the Needs and the

Work Style of Elderly

There are many rumors and realities about older

workers in the literature. Often, phrases are

mentioned like “older employees are less

productive” or “older employees have difficulties to

understand and to learn the use of new ISs”. Because

of these statements, elderly are discriminated or

even not considered in engagements and the

allocation to trainings.

According to (Liu & Fidel, 2000) older

employees seem to have more difficulties than

younger ones when dealing with complex EIS. In a

study, the researchers evaluate the role of advanced

technological tools to share information between

employees by rolling out a knowledge sharing

system. Mostly older employees had difficulties in

using the system. Other researchers assume that the

usage of emerging technologies or ISs by elderly

highly depends on their “perceived usefulness”

(Morris & Venkatesh, 2000). Based on these

findings we want to conduct surveys to examine the

demands and behavior of elderly by using IS.

4.2 Designing Systems for Elderly

Today, ISs are used to fulfill an enormous amount of

tasks. They are growing, interlinked and mutually

integrated. Thus, they result in highly complex

applications, whose usage is difficult to learn – not

only for older employees. To increase the

productivity of especially older workers in the use of

EISs, we have identified following three approaches:

a) Elderly-focused EIS. Designing user-centered

interfaces of EISs is widely examined by many

researchers and programmers. Making EIS easier to

use for elderly can have positive side effects to each

employee of a company. In our research work, we

want to detect these effects and define correlations

between the several factors of influence.

b) Providing Knowledge Management Systems

for Elderly. Today, there is a variety of EIS which

support operational, tactical, and strategic processes.

One group of ISs gained importance due to the high

number of knowledge workers: knowledge sharing

applications. These applications facilitate the

externalization of employees’ knowledge and its

provision to the whole workforce of the company.

Often, this workforce is highly heterogeneous

consisting of traditional full-time employees,

temporaries or part-timers. Therefore, knowledge

and experience are as volatile as companies’

employees. With an aging workforce, the risk of

knowledge loss is increasing due to early retirement

and pension. In order to keep the knowledge its

boundaries, companies have to face the challenge of

knowledge capturing. Thus, new models of

knowledge sharing adapted to the needs of elderly,

are needed. In our ongoing research, we want to

analyze different established information exchange

systems used in companies and identify best

practices in knowledge sharing between employees

and retired people.

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c) Developing New Kinds of Demographic-centric

ISs. The productivity of enterprises can be enhanced

not only by adapting existing ISs to the demographic

change and the needs of older employees. The

introduction of next-generation platforms focusing

on elderly, may also achieve a significant added

value to companies.

In companies, there is a wide variety of

activities, which fit to different types of employees.

Because retired persons possess valuable skills,

which may boost the competitiveness of the

company, they should also be involved in the

fulfillment of various tasks. Therefore, we plan to

implement a private platform for companies to

outsource tasks to its retirees according to the

principle of crowdsourcing. Anyone of the former

employees in the community who is interested in

completing a task for the company can register to

this platform and submit a solution. From all the

submitted solutions the company evaluates their

quality and rewards all of them or only single

solutions. Therefore, such a platform may help

companies not only to access the knowledge and

experience of older employees and retired people,

but also to save costs and drive innovation. After

implementing the platform in a company an

extensive study to verify the productivity

enhancement should be carried out.

5 SUMMARY

The demographic change does not only entail an

aging society, but also an aging workforce. To

improve the performance of older employees,

companies have to carry out many changes.

Especially, in the field of EIS adjustments have to be

conducted to leverage the potential benefits of

elderly. In this paper we provided a statement about

our research on adapting EIS to the challenge of an

aging workforce.

We have identified two main research streams:

Firstly, we will run an empirical study to understand

the needs and work style of older workers in their

real working environment and conditions. Secondly,

we will design ISs for elderly. For this purpose, we

will follow a design science driven approach and

develop concrete software artefacts which then will

be evaluated by elderly.

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