While technology can be a great enabler for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), for businesses owners, the actual benefits are sometimes hard to see.
So says Chris Welham, executive director at Space Age Technologies, a Stellenbosch company that provides IT services to SMEs.
According to Welham, research recently conducted by Space Age Technologies found that business owners felt investments in technology almost never lived up to their business value expectations.
"They said while they needed it to keep their organisations going, it played little, if any, part in being a major growth driver for them," says Welham.
The study also found a sharp divide between the people driving the business and those responsible for its IT system. Business people wanted an IT system that advanced the business goals, but IT people were struggling to keep up with increasingly complex IT environments and the ever-changing needs of users.
McKinsey research director Paul Willmott recently wrote that the move to a digital economy offers companies a chance to reinvent themselves. "Many organisations are siloed around different functions or geographies. But digital customers expect a fully consistent and joined-up experience. And that requires companies to think quite differently about the way they organise their governance structures, as well as their standards for data and systems," says Willmott.
The growing reach of technology is already radically changing how some areas of the business see the role of IT, he said.
"Research group Gartner predicts, for instance, that by 2017, the chief marketing officer will spend more on IT than the chief information officer." According to Willmott, CEOs who were grasping the importance of the digital age were no longer content to leave IT to the CIO, and were now "getting personally involved" in determining where and how technology can help - and even transform - the business."
Welham believes this kind of involvement in the deployment of technology is, in many ways, more important than the specifics of the IT system a company is using. He adds that the only way technology has a chance of adding real value to a business is if the CEO and at least the executive team include IT in their business strategy discussions.
"Business owners cannot put their heads in the sand when it comes to dealing with the challenges brought by the digital age," he concludes.
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