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.
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.