Technology is a very important part of our businesses today. As entrepreneurs and SME owners, having the right technology can make a huge difference in our business ratings, experience and even its success.
Studies have shown that 95 percent of organizations encounter serious challenges with the technology they chose to achieve their business objectives. More often, companies have difficulties in handling the change in their business operations caused by the technology solutions deployed across the organization
Here are some of the technology challenges faced by SMEs.
- High cost.
YouGov recently carried out a report on behalf of Telegraph Spark and Yorkshire Bank discovered that one of the biggest challenges for SMEs in their quest to acquire new technologies was cost.
The reality for many SMEs is that they all want to start out well and on a good pace but the decision to acquire technology or upgrade their already existing ones boil down to their financial strength and capacity.
- Understanding the times.
Technology keeps advancing, like every second literally. In such a way that anyone who snoozes, loses. If you sleep on technology, you’ll have to pack up your business. It’s that fast.
While this is a very good thing, it also poses challenges to SMEs because the balance between having updated technology and having overspent on gadgets that seems to not be as useful as the upcoming ones is a very slim one.
The dynamics are a lot. It’s also not optional because if the systems the SMEs already spent so much money acquiring are slow, it will affect their productivity and also their profit. The onus lies on SMEs to be able to project and understand the dynamics of technology. This way, they are able to get the best out of their existing systems without letting technology move past them.
- Security
Your business doesn’t have to be big for it to be a target to cyber bullies and criminals. “Yahoo boys and girls” like they are popularly called are everywhere these days! Cyber criminals are very rampant. No matter how small your business is, as far as you’re making profit, it’s a target.
This is a huge challenge to SMEs because they don’t have enough resources and financial capacity to acquire top security systems and their already existing ones are not so mature.
Everyone knows that their data needs to be secured including SMEs but there’s a challenge on how much should be spent on security systems and which affordable yet quality products are available for them can choose from.
- Choice of software.
The Enterprise Research Centre conducted a research and they discovered that the most popular technologies used by small businesses are cloud computing, customer relationship management software (CRM), and e-commerce.
The issue however is that there are a lot of apps that can be used by businesses from planning and organizing apps even up until those that can be used to allocate bonuses to staff.
Based on the variety of existing apps, the challenge is that every SME wants to be as effective as possible but engaging these multiple apps for everything would mean being overloaded with software to maintain.
- Connecting the solution to customer experience
For every business, the customer is the topmost priority which means that every investment in technology has to affect the customer experience positively.
However, most times smaller organizations don’t have an idea or a vision of how each technology investment they make will impact their end customer experience. They just copy large firms and invest in the same technologies they use and this can cost them a lot in the long run and make them redundant.
