Challenges
Information Technology Challenges Faced by Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses
Abstract
Unlike large corporations, small businesses commonly lack access to consistent, professional information and service. They cannot maintain permanent information technology (IT) staff and, too often, cannot afford the cost of expensive consulting firms.
Consequently, this creates a vacuum that is filled in a haphazard, crisis-by-crisis manner by depending on semi-skilled technicians, inexpensive friends and relatives, and other resources of dubious quality. Lack of guidance for making sound purchasing decisions is also the source of many IT woes. The situation exposes businesses to known vulnerabilities. These fall into seven major categories:
- Cost
- Quality
- Consistency
- Backup
- Management
- Data Chaos
- Enhancement
- Lie Detection
Cost
Finding the right balance between spending too much and too little is difficult. When your business is new, positive cash flow is an obsessive concern. There is a strong temptation (often a necessity) to cut costs wherever you can. This can lead to poor decisions regarding hardware, software, and the importance of using licensed applications. Then, once customers start banging down your door and money is less a concern, bad advice from associates, friends, and computer industry sales people may tempt you to buy software or hardware you simply do not need or which does not enhance your business.
Quality
Finding the highest quality devices, service, and advice without paying excessive fees is a critical challenge.
Consistency
If a company provides excellent service on Monday, it is a big problem if help is unavailable, distracted, or inaccurate when you need it on Thursday. In a large firm, there are often redundant levels of expertise. If one person is unhelpful or wrong, there is usually someone else who can help. Small businesses do not enjoy this luxury. They have an elevated need for consistent, accurate information and service from all of their vendors and employees. Your IT vendors are particularly critical to your daily business health. The need for consistent, professional, and accurate service and information is acutely important.
Backup
Your business exists in electronic form on your computers: in databases, spreadsheets, word processing documents, and a variety of other software objects. In a sense, the information stored on your computers represents a virtual version of your business. This may not be evident when all is well, but wait until a machine storing irreplaceable data crashes for good. Computers, despite their reasonably good track record are, after all, only machines. They do fail from time to time. Software can also crash in ways that compromise data integrity.
A well-organized company IT strategy assumes this will happen sooner or later. Such a strategy includes plans to recover when it does happen. They plan for these types of disasters by adhering to a good backup policy.
Too frequently, harried small business owners put little thought into the possibility that they will need thorough backups. Yet, the difference between an inconvenience and a business catastrophe depends on your backup method. Is it good? Is it a chaotic, sporadically done mess? Do you even have a backup policy? These are questions to ask and problems to solve now, before it's too late.
Management (IT)
Computer systems, small or large, require competent management. From verifying normal operation to identifying potential problems and casualty control for existing problems, keeping the system running as well as possible is a priority. This is a thought- and time-intensive job that shouldn't be done by preoccupied small-business owners or their busy staffs whose responsibilities typically lie elsewhere. Often, the job is given to the same cast of characters (relatives, cornerstore consultants, etc.) who incompetently or incompletely handled other critical jobs. Proper system management is a fundamental requirement.
Data Chaos
Do you know where your critical business data is? If your business is like most, you don't. One employee (the person who handles billing?) has the only copy of an important spreadsheet on their machine, while another keeps a critical legal document on their laptop. To find this data, you must search and hope nothing bad happens to your employees or their machines. This is all too common and totally unacceptable. We've developed a simple solution to address this problem. We call it the Data-Centered approach.
Enhancement
Once a system is working, stable, and properly serving your business needs, there will be opportunities to upgrade. These can be software and/or hardware upgrades. The trick is knowing when you've reached the point where upgrading is a good idea and which upgrades — from the seemingly endless list of choices — makes sense for your business. Here, as in every other area, solid guidance is not a luxury.
Lie Detection
The simple fact is, software vendors don't always tell the truth. It is not unusual for applications to be marketed with embellished claims and misleading language. Even worse, because software (all software) is sold with liability-free, “as-is” licenses, software firms are shielded from liability when poorly written software clashes with your systems and existing data. Experienced IT professionals are better able to discard marketing hype and determine which claims are accurate and which are simply absurd. This is the sort of knowledge small businesses, with their greater exposure to catastrophic failure, absolutely must have available to them.