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