Small-Business IT Investment
From August 2005
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What it doesn’t mean, says Hoffman, is to adopt unilaterally technologies just because their hype emphasizes they’ll speed up processes and are cheap to implement.
“Online polling is alluring because it’s relatively quick and inexpensive. It also tends to capture large numbers of responses, and its proponents say that statistical weighting techniques can help to produce representative samples,” she says.
“But details about how a survey isconducted are an indication of its qualityand its usefulness in decision making. EMH uses CATI software so we can randomly select participants,” Hoffman continues.
Formalize a Budget
As if battling product hype isn’t enough of a challenge, small businesses can inflict damage on their own, says Cook, by not taking the time to create a formal IT budget. “This means that the business case, true ROI (return oninvestment) and TCO (total cost ofownership) is impossible to measure.”
Auburn-based Pinnacle Telecommunications Inc., recognizing the need to develop the right kind of IT plan, hired an IT director so the company can integrate its older legacy systems with newer technologies.
Doing so, says CEO Cecilia Lakatos Sullivan, will allow operationally oriented Pinnacle to become more efficient and offer quality service while improving the bottom line.
Setting goals for this director is key.“Although we’re a small company, our IT director is tasked with doing consistent R&D. At our size, research and development consists of finding other already developed applications and adapting them to our purposes,” she says.
Continued...
“Online polling is alluring because it’s relatively quick and inexpensive. It also tends to capture large numbers of responses, and its proponents say that statistical weighting techniques can help to produce representative samples,” she says.
“But details about how a survey isconducted are an indication of its qualityand its usefulness in decision making. EMH uses CATI software so we can randomly select participants,” Hoffman continues.
Formalize a Budget
As if battling product hype isn’t enough of a challenge, small businesses can inflict damage on their own, says Cook, by not taking the time to create a formal IT budget. “This means that the business case, true ROI (return oninvestment) and TCO (total cost ofownership) is impossible to measure.”
Auburn-based Pinnacle Telecommunications Inc., recognizing the need to develop the right kind of IT plan, hired an IT director so the company can integrate its older legacy systems with newer technologies.
Doing so, says CEO Cecilia Lakatos Sullivan, will allow operationally oriented Pinnacle to become more efficient and offer quality service while improving the bottom line.
Setting goals for this director is key.“Although we’re a small company, our IT director is tasked with doing consistent R&D. At our size, research and development consists of finding other already developed applications and adapting them to our purposes,” she says.
Continued...
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