SMEs Lead The Way

There is a big paradox in the UK business market: The UK is a world leader in business consultancy and outsourcing; British know-how is exported all over the world by companies and corporations keen to reap the benefits of our superb further education standards and general expertise. 

The UK is also one of the slowest countries in the world when it comes to the adoption of new practices for improving efficiency and cutting overheads. 

This is particularly true of the IT market in the UK; technology and working practices that are common place the world over are still only making gradual inroads into the UK.  Partly this is down to the working culture; long hours, lots of paperwork, comparatively heavy workloads and a good deal of micromanagement all lead to companies often having neither the time nor the patience to explore the benefits of utilising IT as a way of making improvements. 

Ironically it is these more tedious aspects of the daily grind that the adoption of sensible IT solutions aims to do away with.

Interestingly the UK market for IT tends to follow a pattern which is the reverse of that seen in other countries.  In the UK it is small to medium enterprises which tend to adopt newer technologies first, albeit on a necessarily smaller scale than larger corporate entities.

One good example of this is in the adoption of Content Management Systems (CMS) for websites.  While many large companies still either outsource the management of their websites to third party agencies or employ a “webmaster” or group of people that fulfil a similar role, the SME market has been much quicker in its adoption of CMS systems. CMS allows them to manage their websites internally without the requirement for staff that are qualified in HTML or similar web authoring skills.

The real benefits of this to an SME, where lost time and overheads are extremely important, is in making some respectable cuts in budget requirements or man-hours needing to be assigned to certain tasks.

In essence this is the benefit offered by most IT solutions; they cut time from menial tasks and allow staff to deal with the more important money making activities.  In larger companies lost time is very often overlooked or considered par for the course, in SME’s recouping lost time can make the difference between profit and loss.