IDIAL – Intelligent Services Innovative Agile Local

IDIAL – Intelligent Services Innovative Agile Local

The IDIAL project – Intelligent Services Innovative Agile Local – supports small and medium-sized craft businesses in Rhineland-Palatinate on their path to digitalisation with solutions from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI offers enormous potential for business processes, but is often too complex and costly for SMEs. High licensing and operating costs, data protection requirements and a confusing variety of solutions make implementation difficult. IDIAL aims to overcome these challenges by having DFKI develop AI services for knowledge workers in the skilled trades that are specifically tailored to the needs of smaller companies, while ITA contributes its expertise in ergonomics and eBZ supports the practical implementation. Together, they are researching and developing economical and practical approaches that optimise work processes in the field of knowledge work and take into account the specific requirements of SMEs.

The IDIAL project aims to contribute to technology-oriented competence building in Rhineland-Palatinate. To this end, three scientific institutions involved in the project are being supported in establishing and expanding their expertise. At the same time, IDIAL actively involves practical partners from the skilled trades in the research approach. This ensures that challenges in companies can be better understood and combined with current research results to develop new and innovative solutions .

The ITA will contribute its expertise in human-centred technology introduction and design to the project. The basis for this is provided by ergonomic approaches to the socio-technical design of complex and dynamic work systems, which the ITA has expanded in recent years, primarily through its support of digitalisation projects in medium-sized companies, and harmonised with modern approaches to organisational development (e.g. the Service Secretary project or the Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum Kaiserslautern). The IDIAL solution strategy therefore focuses on the early integration of ergonomic and technological development based on the specific tasks of information and knowledge workers.

In doing so, the ITA will, among other things:

• Conduct surveys of employees on knowledge work and AI acceptance
• Record knowledge work processes
• Derive the requirements of knowledge workers in SMEs
• Define use cases in the field of knowledge work in the skilled trades
• Implement human-centred technology design methods to increase usability and UX
• Provide human-centred support for the introduction and evaluation of demonstrators
• Carry out project evaluation