smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Microsoft and Durham Business School have launched a report that links IT investment to company growth. The study, entitled Growth and use of IT among small businesses, aims to show how growing companies use and view investment in IT when compared to businesses not achieving growth.

The data provides a snapshot of the types of IT companies use to meet business challenges, how they are using it, whether they believe IT brings tangible benefits and where they are likely to invest in technology in the future.

The report shows that when compared to non-growth businesses, successful, growing businesses tend to:

· Use more diversified sources for IT advice

· Have more software and arguably more sophisticated systems

· Have more appreciation that IT can (and has) delivered benefits to their business and how it might help them overcome challenges

· Talk about IT in terms of what it can do for employees, so have a people-centric attitude to IT

· Display a greater willingness to spend more on IT in future to generate competitive advantage and growth

While there is little difference between the business challenges faced by growth and non-growth companies of any particular size band, the report does suggest that growing businesses use IT to a greater extent to address these challenges.

For example, a total of 62 per cent of growth companies cite managing customer data as a motivation for software investment, compared with 45 per cent of non-growth companies.

While non-growth companies tend to turn to IT to support internal processes, reporting and generating data about staff productivity, growth companies are more external in focus and tend to deploy IT to enable better customer engagement, allow their employees to work flexibly and gather intelligence about their marketplace, says the study.

Simon Hughes, director of SMB Customers, Microsoft UK, says: ‘The report suggests that growing companies have a greater external business focus and a greater use of IT to meet their business challenges than companies which historically have not grown. This external focus in turn leads to further growth, with many of these growing companies expecting to derive tangible competitive advantage from their technology.’

Microsoft provides advice and support for Britain’s businesses, visit www.microsoft.com/uk/business

There are currently no comments on this article