Methodology for impact evaluation of digitalisation

Digitalisation or digital transformation is a process strictly connected to digitisation: i.e. the technical conversion of information from analogue to digital format. Through digitisation, data is generated from everyday life (“datafication”): peoples, social interactions, business activities or physical objects. However, digitalisation goes beyond digitisation (datafication).

A Socio-Cyber-Physical System can be understood as follows:

1. A system is a set of entities with relations and interactions between them. These interactions can create new entities. The entities and the boundaries of a system are defined by the observer in relation to his/her purposes. Hence a description of a system is a representation of reality according to a specific observer.
2. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are next-generation engineered systems that integrate embedded computing technology (cyber part) into the physical phenomena by using transformative research approaches that account for the complexity and multi-disciplinarity of such systems.
3.  A socio-technical system consists of social entities and technical entities that interact with each other and have equal importance in the understanding of socio-technical systems. Social actors all have various needs, wants, skills, knowledge. Technical entities are non-human entities, including technologies as well as processes surrounding those technologies.
4. A SCPS consist of three domains (socio, cyber and physical) all of equal importance and with the ability to influence other domains. Each domain has a broad range of different entities governed by a set of rules, but also between domains hybrid rules determine the relations and interactions of the entities within the domains.

Living Labs are a participatory tool increasingly applied in Europe for the involvement of users in technology development. The DESIRA Living Labs are networks of stakeholders established across Europe and selected to represent a variety of agricultural, rural and forestry domains. They are constituted around a focal question (e.g. How to reduce the risk of forest fires?) and co-develop ideas, scenarios, digital storytelling outputs, and socio-technical solutions related to digitalisation. Interaction in the networks is based on both face-to-face and online activities.

Examples of focal questions include:

In this first phase, Living Labs analysed the context of their focal questions in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis). The SWOT analysis considered various dimensions, such as social, economic, governance, environmental, gender aspects, but paid more attention to the level of digitalisation, based on the Digital Economy and Society Index. This helped narrow down the analysis on major needs, elements, and issues at stake in the SCPS.

In this second phase, Living Labs mapped the SCPS providing the opportunity to visualise the relationships between entities across different or within the same domain (socio-socio, socio-cyber, etc.). They applied their own expertise and the DESIRA’s taxonomy and inventory of digital technologies.

In this third phase, impacts were assessed ex post (past and present). To engage stakeholders in the participatory assessment, impacts were defined as the direct and indirect, positive or negative implications of existing digitalisation upon the entities, relationships, activities mapped out by the LLs in their SCPS, as well as upon the 17 SDGs. These impacts were captured in qualitative terms based on the perception of the respondents and participants of LLs’ research activities.