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Great Expectations

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PCQ Bureau
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It's a well known fact that IT has

become essential for every organization

today, be it small, medium, or large. The

difficulty lies in understanding how it can

be put to effective use. While large enterprises

have the budgets to allocate manpower

to identify the right technologies

and implement them, it's the SMEs that

face all the trouble. They don't understand

technology, nor do they have the required

time or energy to learn it. As a result,

most SME clusters still consider IT as a

cost center, and are therefore skeptical

about investing in it.

How do you get out of this problem?

One way is by having an IT champion

in the company, who is given the responsibility

of interacting with all business

heads to understand their concerns. This

person would then be in the best position

to recommend the appropriate IT solutions

to combat the concerns. More

importantly, since the person has already

established a rapport with all the business

heads, getting a buy-in to implement technology

would also be easier. If for

instance, you can convince the CFO of

your company that you can help cut down

specific costs significantly by implementing

a particular technology, then the rest

would be much easier. The CFO would

then champion your cause.

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The other way is to take IT to the board

level in the company, so that it's discussed

as seriously as any other business

line of the organization. Being driven from

the top will bring some seriousness

toward using IT in the organization, and

reduce resistance to change among business

users.

Third, avoid copying what others have

done blindly. This was the mistake that

most large enterprises did many years

ago, wherein they simply implemented

whatever technology their competitor was

using, or fell for something because their

close friend or relative recommended it.

As a result, the deployment failed, leading

to losses. So it's not necessary that the

technology that has worked for someone

else will also work for you.

So choose technology with care and

clearly understand the impact it will have

on your business. Though most of these

statements are generic, they often tend to

be ignored by SMEs.

In this story, we've covered six industry

clusters, the business challenges they

face, and some IT solutions that can help

alleviate those challenges. Plus, we've

also done a survey of some Indian SMEs

to understand what sort of technologies

are they planning to deploy in the future.

This could be used as a reference point to

plan out your own IT strategy moving forward.

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