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IT Consumption for Small Firms

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA:

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Getting MSME users to increase IT consumption has become the new growth mantra for IT firms with hardly a day passing without media coverage of an IT firm extolling the uniqueness of its MSME specific offerings. From esoteric technology paradigms such as cloud computing, SaaS and Web 2.0 to the more mundane financial incentives, IT firms are leaving no stone unturned towards creating an IT nirvana for the MSME user.

Major problems to MSME related to IT are:

Supplyside problem

New paradigm

Reliability factor

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Also read: Profiles of Leading SMB Asociations across India

To examine the poor IT usage levels in MSME firms,followin 3A prism will be used:

Is IT appropriate?

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Many nationally branded IT products available in India have been created for a context which is different from the Indian MSME usage context. To overcome this contextual gap, product vendors tend to launch India versions of their products which typically involves nothing more than stripping away some features of their core products without making any genuine attempts to address the user’s fundamental issues.

Is IT affordable?

While hardware prices have shown a downward bias recently, software and service prices have tended to move northwards. While many may disagree and point to the recent trend of software product vendors offering special India prices, it is important to evaluate IT costs from a lifecycle Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) perspective rather than as one time cost.

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Is IT Adopted?

For IT to provide sustainable business value to the user, from either growth

or efficiency perspectives, it is important to differentiate between IT deployment and adoption. A firm may be invested heavily in IT assets but still have sub-optimal adoption levels if its core business processes are not adequately IT enabled.

Source: www.nasscom.in