Small Business can be Beautiful when it comes to IT.

I see many small businesses that are struggling with the use of computers. They often spend the money thinking they are going to get improvements and end up with far less than what they expect. What is the problem here?

Large businesses have many different problems. In a large business, many people have to work together to get the job done. Many of these people hardly even see each other. They make assumptions about what other people are doing and try to do their best, in their own little silo. In many cases, they are operating to different objectives, objectives set by department and end up working at cross purposes. When new software is implemented, the project is often assigned to dedicated people, people who don't do the job on a day to day basis. They develop the new processes, identify what needs to be done and turn it over to the people that have to make it happen. There are huge communication problems and even when the needs are identified, it is difficult to solve.

In small businesses, people work much closer together. They can see each other and should know what everybody is doing. They don't have departments with different objectives. They shouldn't have silos and communication problems........... But they do. I have seen organizations as small as 5 people operating in silos and not knowing what each other is doing and what impact they are having on each other.

So the problem is not unique to large business. It also exists in small.

The good news is, it's easy to solve in small businesses:

• It's easy to set a single obective.
• It's easy to get people in a room and talk about what needs to be done.
• You can undertake major changes in software, business process, organization and do it in a few months.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that when organizations decide to implement new software, they think of it as a technical project to be run by technicians. It isn't.

The reason that you start is that you want to upgrade your business by using technology more effectively. To make it work you need to:

• Have a common business goal that is understood by everybody.
• Understand how you will achieve that goal, by changing your business process, using the tools provided by the software, training your people to work differently, perhaps changing roles and responsibilities.
• Installing the software and converting your data.

Only the last one is technical. The first two are not. Success should not be measured by whether the software was installed, but by what business goals were achieved.

Large businesses can afford to put extra resources towards a large project. Small businesses can't. They also need to demand business results quickly.