Small and midsize businesses recognize the business value of Web-enabling their business processes. Many find that path challenging.
The Internet has always presented small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with the opportunity to think big and act accordingly. It enables them to participate as equal partners in different value chains and gives access to sophisticated business applications and processes in an affordable way.
While some SMBs have taken advantage of the Internet, many are still at a basic level when it comes to integrating the Internet into their business activities. Nearly 70 percent of SMBs that have developed Web and Internet applications are using them for internal communications and reporting only.
However, SMBs are feeling pressure to establish more-competitive links with their customers, partners and suppliers.
A Matter of Priorities
In a recent Gartner survey, a group of midsize businesses identified Web-enablement as a top IT priority. Employing Web-enabling applications and in many cases, linking them together are ways many SMB CIOs believe they can cost-effectively expose, enhance, leverage and extend business processes and information to customers, vendors, partners and employees.
SMBs should resist the temptation to wait for Internet and Web technologies to become perfect. Many available Internet and Web solutions can improve the way SMBs do business. Key areas that CIOs should focus on include:
- Optimizing Web site effectiveness
- Utilising web marketing techniques & solutions
- Utilizing Web-based process management capabilities
- Building and leveraging Web services
- Embracing Web-based business service providers where appropriate
- Improving the performance of deployed Web-enabled applications
Establishing a Presence and Making it Work for You
After extending their e-mail systems, creating a Web presence is one of the first projects that SMBs embrace when leveraging the Internet.
Although more than 80 percent of midsize businesses have Web sites, many fall short of supporting their business objectives. SMBs should focus on measuring and optimizing the effectiveness of their Web sites, as well as ensuring they do a better job of managing their Web site infrastructure. “SMBs Should Improve Their Web Sites,” offers guidance on how to make a Web presence more effective by focusing on design issues, targeting measurement principles and improving control and accountability.
Many SMBs still use static websites paying internal or external developers to change the site as required. Unfortunately the bottlenecks just mean the site stays 'static', search ratings go down, clients and other visitors lose interest.
At QEB we provide your hosting infrastructure, we deliver sites with a multitude of tools which enable you to manage the content on your site yourself. We integrate directly into Google Analytics giving a far greater insight into the traffic and visitors on your site and determine whether the site is achieving its goals.
Web Marketing
Most SMBs still utilise traditional approaches to the task of marketing their businesses. Many of these practices are expensive and difficult to measure in terms of their success and impact. The internet provides many new approaches but most businesses are either unaware or lack the knowledge to implement them effectively in their business.
At QEB we offer a suite of web marketing and online market analysis tools which deliver a whole new paradigm to your marketing toolkit.
Weighing Web Services Options
Web services provide one way SMBs can develop, enable and seamlessly link their business processes. In a recent Gartner survey, 10 percent of midsize businesses cited using Web services for some production applications, while 50 percent stated that they were evaluating and piloting Web services. The potential advantages of using Web services are compelling. They include increased agility, faster and less-expensive integration and the ability to focus on business processes instead of how to integrate and manage the functionality enabled by established IT assets. But before embracing them, SMBs must understand what Web services are, know why they are necessary, and recognize when and how they can be deployed. In “SMBs Should Consider Their Web Services Options,” the value of Web services, as they relate to specific types of applications, are explored.
To fully leverage the power of the Web, SMBs will need to embrace end-to-end business process management (BPM) capabilities for creating seamless business processes that extend across application platforms and outside the enterprise. Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are now touting BPM capabilities and, while Web-enabled integration solutions are finally within reach of SMBs, the competitive landscape remains cloudy. In “SMBs Have Choices for Web-Enabled BPM Solutions,” the roles of some leading ERP providers in this arena are explored along with specific guidance for SMBs evaluating BPM solutions.
QEB have successfully built web service based solutions for organisations like the Prudential & HBOS. We develop bespoke applications and out-of-the-box solutions tailored to your needs.
In Summary
To truly benefit from internet adoption in your business you need the advice of 'internet specialists' with the experience and pedigree to provide the right advice. QEB are internet specialists delivering all the advice and solutions your business needs to succeed.