Nearly nine in ten (86%) small business owners state that technology - and keeping up with technology trends - is important to their business.
A significant majority of small business owners (66%) manage their company’s tech support themselves, while slightly more than one in ten either have someone on their team to manage tech support (13%) or hire an outside vendor (12%) to look after this. This means 79% of businesses are handling IT by themselves and wasting time that could be used to focus on business development.
When it comes to collecting, storing, and sharing business content and information, 36% of small business owners report that they manually collect and store the content on a hard drive, while 26% primarily use filing cabinets and folders. Roughly one quarter use online storage services for content combined with either email to collaborate (14%), or in combination with online collaboration tools (12%). Over one in ten (12%) small business owners, however, claim that they do not have a good solution for collecting, storing, and sharing content. This means that 74% of businesses are either using outdated technology that could fail, or paper filing which could be destroyed or vandalized if a disaster or robbery occurs.
Overall, 30% of small business owners use cloud computing technologies, while the majority of respondents (60%) do not and a further 9% don’t even know what cloud computing is.
70% of small business owners agree that they are able to more quickly and intelligently respond to their customers because of technology. Furthermore, 61% agree that technology helps them compete with similar and larger companies in their market.
Technology is also perceived as helping the bottom line: 60% believe that it helps their company increase revenue, while 54% feel that it helps to decrease operational costs. A similar proportion (52%) agrees that their business leverages current technologies to improve productivity.
