Part II: Gearing SMEs for Global Competition Through ICT

Information. Communication. These two words automatically bring the Internet, Office software, and a myriad of other things. These are the sides of the box provided by marketers and consultants leveraging the work of marketers; they do not encapsulate information and technology. The mobile phone you have on your body, the PDA you might have, the scrap pad next to the telephone and the contents of the brains of anyone in your organization is just as much a part of Information and Technology as the internet.

Putting Global Competition In Context: Microprocessor Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Globalization and the competition in global markets makes the use of technology important for any company, even if it's market is not 'global'. This is because while the clients or consumers may be local, other companies in other countries can now more easily access the market that used to be separated more concretely by geography.

When the Berlin Wall fell on August 23rd, 1989, the economic ripple of the world was felt.

As Thomas Friedman wrote in The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

In the old days, a reporter, columnist or statesman could get away with thinking of his "market" as City Hall, or the Statehouse, or the White House, or the Pentagon, or the Treasury Department, or the State Department. But the relevant market today is the planet Earth and the global integration of technology, finance, trade and information in a way that is influencing wages, interest rates, living standards, culture, job opportunities, wars and weather patterns all over the world. It is not that the system of globalization explains everything happening in the world today. It is simply that to the extent that one system is influencing more people in more ways at the same time, it is globalization.

The 'market' changed not only for reporters, columnists and statesmen - it changed for businesses. It changed for consumers. It changed the relationships between businesses and consumers; it allowed for global competition - and then the Internet accelerated everything beyond the speed and cost of fax machines, phone calls and mail.

Friedman (ibid) goes on to define a 'disease':

MIDS [Microprocessor Immune Deficiency Syndrome]: A disease that can afflict any bloated, overweight, sclerotic system in the post-Cold War era. MIDS is usually contracted by countries and companies that fail to innoculate themselves against changes brought about by the microchip, and the democratizations of technology, finance and information - which created a much faster, more open and more complex marketplace, with a whole new set of efficiencies. The symptoms of MIDS appear when a country or company exhibits a consistent inability to increase productivity, wages, living standards, knowledge use and competitiveness, and becomes too slow to respond to the challenges of the Fast World. Countries and companies with MIDS tend to be those run on Cold War corporate models - where one or few people at the top hold all the information and make all the decisions, and all the people in the middle and the bottom simply carry out those decisions, using only the information they need to know to do their jobs. The only known cure for countries and companies with MIDS is 'the fourth democratization.' This is the democratization of decision-making and information flows, and the deconcentration of power, in ways that allow more people in a country or company to share knowledge, experiment and innovate faster. This enables them to keep up with a marketplace in which consumers are constantly demanding cheaper products and services tailored specifically for them. MIDS can be fatal to those companies and countries that do not get appropriate treatment in time.

When we talk about 'Gearing SMEs for Global Competition Through ICT', what we're really talking about is innoculating SMEs against the dreaded disease, MIDS. MIDS keeps your organization uncompetitive. It makes your consumers shop elsewhere. It keeps new consumers from finding you, and it keeps your own company from sharing information within itself quickly.

MIDS will kill your organization. The intuitive thing to do is to kill MIDS, but like it's analog (AIDS) - it's constantly morphing and therefore is difficult and perhaps impossible to defeat MIDs. The good news is that MIDs is also defined by global competitors - the further ahead they are than your organization, the worse a case of MIDs your organization may have. Like running away from a bear, an organization doesn't have to be faster at adapting technology than MIDs - the organization simply has to be faster than it's competition.

SMEs and Technology

Generally speaking, the use of technology for a large corporation, an NGO, and a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) are not different at all. However, a SME's use of technology should be at a minimum as good as that of a large corporation - if not better. The key areas for a SME to focus on are:

• Understanding The Global Culture of Time
• Knowing It's Business
• Knowing Other's Business
• Adapting Technology With Tangible Results

Time Culture

Tick. Tock. During the late 1990s, the phrase 'Internet Time' was tossed around quite a bit as a part of the Internet boom - it's a modernization of the phrase, 'a New York minute'. As one would expect, things happen faster in Internet Time.

Time is a culture. As Benjamin Franklin said, 'Time is money'. And - what SMEs have to accept and adopt is the fact that global time is a reality, and when you're staring at your watch you better hope that everyone else in the world is doing the same - because if they are not staring at their watches, they are working faster than you, even with the adaptation of technology itself.

'Just now' doesn't exist within the global culture of time. Now is the future, more so now than at any time in history. Where a bus used to be good enough for transporting data, now any enterprise needs a fleet of sports cars.

Knowing Business

How you do your business should control how you use your technology - not the other way around. A piece of software, a piece of hardware, or even a mobile phone network should not define how you run your business: You define how your enterprise functions.

The era of blaming technology limitations is over. There's simply no time for blaming technology.

What technology can do is allow a SME to operate more 'democratically'. Where information used to flow 'up' and pool there, information in a modern organization flows both up and down. Successful companies in this era disseminate more information to their employees, and the employees make more informed decisions based on that information.

Accurate information has to flow through the enterprise efficiently, and this also includes the clients and the suppliers. Making changes based on the information defines how reactive or adaptive an organization is. It's the transformation of the bus into sports cars. I'll be covering this more in detail during the presentation, 'Transforming SMEs through Technology & Innovation' on March 23rd at 10:40 a.m. - or better, @694 beats, 23.03.2006 in Swatch time.

Adapting Technology For Tangible Results

While in, 'Transforming SMEs through Technology & Innovation' (March 23rd at 10:40 a.m.) we'll discuss adaptation of technology more in depth, there are some general principles for adapting technology in a SME.

The first rule is pragmatism. While 'business is risk', SMEs generally have less time and money to take risks. When a change is made in an organization, there should be an expected result. If you give all of your employees email to transfer information back and forth (instead of wearing ruts in your floor), you should expect information to flow faster. You can't tell if that happens if you don't attempt to measure it. Large corporations adapt things such as Six Sigma. Small enterprises can do similar things with simple, common sense statistical process control.

The second rule is to make the technology adapt to your business. While some adaptation to technology is necessary, the technology and the people who advise you should never tell you that your business has to run in certain ways because of the technology - be it a mobile phone, a computer, or a database. The technology exists to extend the enterprise, not limit it. When you hear, "We can't do that", the automatic response should be, "What can we do?". Never trust a consultant to make the right decisions for your enterprise. Ultimately, it's your enterprise and your responsibility. A consultant may give you options.

The third rule, and the most important rule, is that no change is permanent. Everything changes. In the global economy, the one thing that is constant is change - and that rate of change is accelerating around the world at a rate which itself is changing - the one 'constant' is Moore's Law, which is decreasing in overall influence.

Again, specific examples will be provided in the presentation tomorrow.

Governmental Policy Issues

While in the region and specifically Trinidad and Tobago there are policy limitations, these limitations should not be limiting how you use technology in your enterprise. If it is, something is wrong - and something has to be done. There are no easy answers to government policy problems, especially when the government itself is slow to realize the distinct changes in the global culture of time. The truth is that even a developed nation has this problem, as the slow wheels of bureaucracy around the world are the slowest to adapt to Internet time.

MIDS at the government level, when compared to governments of competing countries, affects all businesses including SMEs - but it affects SMEs more. Thus, SMEs cannot always wait on government; in fact, enterprising SMEs will attempt to enable government.

Closing

This was a very high level presentation that is intended to allow people to consider how a SME has to compete in a global market; the issues covered are general and don't focus on any one aspect of technology. In a way, it's been an introduction to technology in a global context. Specific business problems within each SME have to be identified and dealt with at a much faster rate than the era that preceded August 23rd, 1989.

The message that every SME should take home is not, 'Adapt or Die' - instead, that message should be, 'Adapt appropriately or die a slow, lingering death'. Tomorrow I'll be covering, 'Transforming SMEs through Technology & Innovation' which will deal with technology much more directly. At this time, questions and comments are welcome.

This is a teaser of a presentation (titled the same) I shall be making at the seminar, 'Improving Organisational Performance in SMEs through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) here in Trinidad and Tobago, and is titled the same as my presentation. In the actual presentation, there will be more - this is a general and incomplete outline. A presentation will be attached to this entry/book page, and it will be updated after the presentation. Comments and questions are welcome.