At TechMarketView we have been analysing productivity growth of UK firms and how it can be improved through better use of technology. The broad findings reveal that simply investing in the roll out of a technology is not the answer. To experience a real step change in productivity growth, new technologies must be implemented so they directly align with business objectives/outcomes. Furthermore, reasonable budget must be allocated on an ongoing basis to ensure its appropriate management and improvement. Sage buyers are the ones who acknowledge that greater productivity and value creation will require a long-term commitment to investment.

Alongside this, there is a bigger picture to tackling productivity growth. Organisations need to consider which cultural, process, and people alterations should be made to ensure they optimise technology adoption. The culture around how staff are using tech and their attitude towards it will prove to be one of the most important critical success factors.

While productivity growth continues to be a challenge for UK firms of all sizes, SMBs carry an additional burden – specifically around technology adoption. Smaller firms don’t typically have the finances and resources (and specifically dedicated IT expertise) to research and implement the kind of new technologies that have the potential to really drive innovation and improve resilience. Their size restricts them from engaging directly with the large tech vendors and it can feel very unnerving trying to select a supplier if you have little experience of tech implementations.

Many SMBs instead work with the channel (the ecosystem that enables the supply of products and services from large vendors via distributors and resellers to buyers) to address their tech needs. Indeed, in SMB Productivity: Driving value through modernisation, TechMarketView shows how the channel’s role can in fact be critical to SMB productivity growth. For the report, TechMarketVIew conducted in-depth interviews with five SMBs across a range of sectors to understand how they are bringing new technologies into their organisations, and whether that has resulted in improvements to productivity.

Of course, increased productivity is not always easy to measure, but anecdotally we can look to things such as application uptime, ease of staff collaboration, time taken for tasks to be completed, and so on.

Read the report here: SMB Productivity: Driving value through modernisation

NOTE: A big thank you to the organisations that took part in this research: National Timber Group, McDermotts, Ascot Services, Franklins Solicitors, and DWA Claims.

The channel partners in the report are all SMBs themselves (Excenta, Croft Communications, inTEC, Digital Origin, KSM Telecom), and when SMBs work with SMBs, the whole local economy can benefit.