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Over the last several weeks, Vision33 has focused on sharing business insights gathered from both our business management software implementation consultants as well as from the latest industry research on business trends that represent important considerations for small to midsized businesses for 2013 and beyond.
To recap, the business technology trends previously identified for 2013 were found to fall into the following areas:
Continued adoption of cloud computing
Focus on business agility and speed to market
IT and business alignment
Maximizing benefits from IT system
Business productivity & maximizing expenditure
Previously, the Vision33 blog series focused on the continued adoption of cloud computing, analyzing in more detail why it continues to be a top trend for 2013. The analysis considered the benefits that cloud computing presents for small to midsized businesses, defining its role as a deployment option for business management software such as SAP Business One, in addition to responding to myths about the cloud that may have delayed some small to midsized businesses from adoption the cloud in 2012.
While the topic for this week’s discussion centers on the growing trend for small to midsized businesses to focus on improving business agility and speed to market, it is evident that cloud computing technology is implicit in the discussion since businesses can leverage technology deployed via the cloud to respond to market opportunities and competitive threats.
Business agility and speed to market has ranked highly as a business trend for many years now - suggesting that the downturn in the US economy in recent years, and the continued uncertainty projected into 2013, has resulted in management’s concern with focusing on responsive IT approaches that can deliver immediate value. With cloud-based technologies, businesses are afforded the ability to focus on their core competencies without diverting their attention to developing technologies in house to support the scale of their growing operations. Additionally, they can easily bring online support for additional business functions incrementally which presents costs structures representative of IT budgets for small to midsized businesses.
In this way, cloud computing technologies enable small businesses to improve business agility since they can now focus their resources on their business strategy and core competencies while a vendor manages the software and hardware. Because of the resultant savings, small businesses are then able to shift more resources to innovation, essential for business survival in today’s economy. Next week it is on to IT and business alignment, in the meantime you can learn more in Vision33's Beginner's Guide to ERP.
For fast-growing businesses, the time to shift from small business accounting software (e.g. QuickBooks) to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform may already be upon you. But how do you know for sure and where do you begin sorting through your options?
These are challenging and often complicated questions to answer, and in most cases, the available resources online don’t clarify anything. For that reason, we consolidated all our early stage ERP resources in one place.
