Abandoned Heroes

Following up on yesterday's post I'm going to tell you a bit about "Abandoned Heroes"

This is the project I've been working on all year with Brunel and Royal Holloway Universities. Essentially we were looking at how small companies actually use IT and e-business in their work.

We did 400 telephone interviews and about 50 in-depth interviews of which I did 20. We were looking at 4 main clusters of industry - food, transport and logistics, media and internet.

We did a dissemination event in October called "Abandoned Heroes". I chose the title mainly because these organisations have been left high and dry by the abolition of the IT related business support initiative Uk Online for Business in 2004. What many of these companies need is some "IT Paramedic" training which will help them to set up and manage the IT networks that their businesses come to depend on.

The official channels, whether these are the IT industry, the educational industry or the various government support activities seem to recognise nothing between a user and a fully fledged IT professional. This does nothing for these Abandoned Heroes who are taking their companies into the future with little in the way of useful support.

One thing that was really interesting in the study was the way in which compliance with Government Regulation is driving IT uptake particularly in the logistics and food structures.

A summary of the findings can be found in my Ecademy blog while the full report can be downloaded here

Next entry will be about the differences in perspective between Leadership competencies in public and private sectors.

Alan

Change of name, change of premises, change of everything

We have, like many small companies, been running out of the house for the last couple of years using a wi-fi peer to peer network with a domestic broadband connection.

The growth of our plants business, www.plants4presents.co.uk meant that we had to find some additional space - we actually needed 5000 square feet to store and pack the plants but it turned out that the only way we could achieve this was to take on 105,000 square feet - nearly 2 acres of unused glass house.

So it turns out that we are going through 2 of the common barriers that small companies face at once - moving into proper premises AND putting in a server for the network while hooking up to business broadband. So we ended up moving 2 businesses and ourselves all at the same time. I know I'm not happy unless achieving the impossible but this is ridiculous.

We've had to work quite hard to stabilise the premises - I'll tell you about the gory details another time - but we're currently gearing up for the Christmas Rush - the girls expect to ship 2000 plants in the next 3 weeks - mainly down to Emily's sterling work with the PR.

However it has taken Isobel a lot of work to get the server up and running - she's been writing code since 1981 and managed a large network in our last business so she knows more about what to do than the average small business owner. Nevertheless its been a struggle to get it sorted.

This has interesting links into my own current project "Abandoned Heroes" which deals with how small companies actually use IT and e-business.

I'll cover that in the next post.