All of a business’ technology is important to its operations, but based on its industry, certain priorities are bound to arise. A recent survey cast a light on some of these priorities, giving us a view of what small to medium-sized businesses are concerning themselves with. Let’s review some of the trends this survey revealed to see how well your priorities match up.
This research, conducted by the market research and industry analysis organization Techaisle, collected responses from SMBs and consolidated them to help rank what they saw to be their biggest business challenges, as well as challenges that their technology faced and their technological priorities. They also produced the results from the surveyed small businesses specifically. Let’s look at these results, to see how closely your views match up.
Issues
In terms of the biggest issues that these businesses face, the survey’s results pretty much fell in line with what many would consider common sense. Identified as these top concerns were:
- Attracting and retaining new customers
- Increasing profitability
- Increasing business growth
At the bottom of the list were the following:
- Improving workplace productivity
- Improving effectiveness of sales and marketing
- Focusing on new markets
While this is to be expected, it should be noted that attending to these lesser priorities could also serve to accomplish the goals of those ranked at the top. Regardless, these businesses entered 2020 with the mindset that most smaller organizations would have.
Priorities and Challenges in Their IT
When comparing the results of the survey in these two categories, there is a clear correlation between what the responding businesses saw as their biggest challenges and how these perceptions shaped their priorities. In review, here are the top four priorities and challenges, respectively:
- Cloud / Cloud security
- Mobility solutions / Customer experience
- Collaboration / Maintaining current IT infrastructure
- Managed services / Budget constraints
From this, we can see a clear correlation between the challenges that businesses anticipated with their IT and how they are prioritizing their implementation. These also, incidentally, enable them to address the issues that were also identified in the survey.
With cloud implementation being their top priority, it is only natural that their biggest challenges would pertain to keeping their use of the cloud secure. The same association can be made between collaboration and their customer service, likewise with their adoption of managed services and their joint challenges of IT maintenance and budgetary restrictions.
For assistance with your business’ priorities through the implementation of the appropriate IT solutions, reach out to the professionals at Macatawa Technologies. Our team’s experience is just a call to 616-394-4940 away.
