It has been claimed that the majority of IT spending by SMEs is on communication solutions.
The high spend and investment in communications technology is a result firms seeking to deliver faster and more reliable service to their customers.
Speaking to the SME Times, Dell director Satyen Vyas claimed that in addition to email technology, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management solutions are highly sought-after.
The question which overshadows SMEs investment in more formulised CRM is perhaps the potential for the process to become inhumanised which is perhaps what differentiates SMEs from their larger competitors.
There is the debate as to whether technology is being adopted by SMEs as a result of external or internal pressures, or whether they are taking preemptive actions ahead of their adverseries allowing them to achieve a competitively advantageous position.
Grandon and Pearson (2004) found external pressure to be a statistically significant determinant of technology (e-commerce) adoption by SMEs. Broadly stated, external pressure could include demands on technology adoption imposed by suppliers, trading partners, customers, competitors, and collaborators.
Likewise, competitive pressure has been found to be a strong determinant of the adoption of communication technology by SMEs (Premkumar & Roberts, 1999). Further, technology obsolescence, adoption of newer technological standards by the industry or business sector, and demand from customers or markets also serve as external influences on technology adoption.
New technology presents many opportunities to SMEs but there is evidence that many hurdles are still faced when it comes to technology adoption and that there is still a considerable number of SMEs that are adverse to the risk of embracing new innovative solutions.
Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, Mar 2010 by Badrinarayanan, Vishag, West, Vicki L
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