Embracing digital transformation for SMEs

The past 16 months have shown the impor­tance of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to com­pa­nies up and down the UK. As the Covid cri­sis closed com­mer­cial premis­es nation­wide in 2020, enter­pris­es of all sizes were forced to shift online. Four in 10 small firms respond­ing to a recent poll by Cis­co Sys­tems said that they wouldn’t have sur­vived the year if they hadn’t gone dig­i­tal.
Even as offices start reopen­ing and old ways of work­ing return, some ele­ments of pan­dem­ic prac­tice will remain. But, with their bud­gets tighter than ever, many SMEs may be approach­ing fur­ther tech invest­ments with some trep­i­da­tion.

“You’ve got to take a strate­gic stand and say: ‘Look, if we’re going to do this, it has to be all or noth­ing,’” urges John Har­grave, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer at law firm BP Collins.

Three years ago, his busi­ness start­ed adopt­ing a more dig­i­tal way of work­ing as part of a four-year tran­si­tion plan. “That sounds a bit Stal­in­ist, but it’s not,” he says. “It’s just giv­ing you the frame­work to grow.”

When he was scop­ing out the firm’s future dig­i­tal require­ments and how these would be met, Har­grave had to fore­cast the business’s medi­um-term growth tra­jec­to­ry. “You first have to imag­ine your­self in four years’ time as that big­ger, bet­ter com­pa­ny, then look at the steps you need to take to get there,” he says.

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency Emerg­ing Com­mu­ni­ca­tions has gone through a sim­i­lar set of exer­cis­es. The firm’s com­mer­cial direc­tor, Rachel Clarke, has been over­see­ing the project. She observes that SMEs “by their very nature, often don’t have a wide selec­tion of choic­es with dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Bud­gets for cus­tom-built dig­i­tal plat­forms rarely exist, but there are options to choose from that can be tai­lored to your require­ments, to some degree.”

Clarke scru­ti­nised the company’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions needs care­ful­ly before enter­ing a con­tract with any sup­pli­er. Emerg­ing Com­mu­ni­ca­tions has offices in both Lon­don and Shang­hai, mean­ing that some of her col­leagues sit behind the Chi­nese fire­wall of inter­net cen­sor­ship. Because Google is banned in Chi­na, the com­pa­ny adopt­ed Microsoft’s dig­i­tal work­space plat­form.

“That option gave us broad­ly what we need­ed and could be con­fig­ured for some spe­cif­ic needs,” says Clarke, who thought she’d made the right choice when com­mis­sion­ing a con­tract with Microsoft 365. It was only after the tech­nol­o­gy was rolled out that she realised that it didn’t work as well with the company’s stan­dard-issue Mac lap­tops as it would have done with PCs.

“In hind­sight, we should have done some more research based on the hard­ware we’d be using, although I’m not sure we’d have end­ed up mak­ing a dif­fer­ent choice,” she says, acknowl­edg­ing that it might have proved a more seri­ous issue for anoth­er com­pa­ny in a sim­i­lar posi­tion.

Treat digital transformation as a priority

Har­grave believes that there’s a ten­den­cy among SMEs to view dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion as a non-essen­tial project, rather than a busi­ness-crit­i­cal pri­or­i­ty.

“This is about future-proof­ing the busi­ness. It’s also part of con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning,” he says, refer­ring to tasks such as procur­ing the right IT equip­ment to ensure that staff can work at home in an emer­gency – some­thing that pre­pared BP Collins par­tic­u­lar­ly well for the Covid lock­downs.

Pre­sent­ing the impor­tance of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in such terms can often help to win over scep­ti­cal col­leagues, who are often those hold­ing the purse strings.

Clarke acknowl­edges that “per­suad­ing peo­ple to part with mon­ey when they think things are work­ing already can be hard. Bud­getary con­straints can be an issue. For­tu­nate­ly, our CEO is very for­ward-think­ing in this respect.”

When BP Collins was choos­ing a provider of a pub­lic-pri­vate cloud serv­er, it sought out a sim­i­lar­ly sized com­pa­ny. It’s an approach that Har­grave would rec­om­mend to any firm con­sid­er­ing an IT part­ner.

“It’s impor­tant to match the size of their busi­ness to the size of your busi­ness,” he says. “There’s no point in going with a com­pa­ny for which you’d be among the small­est 10% of its clients. You need to be an impor­tant client to your provider, so you can get that meet­ing of minds.”

Clarke adds that it’s impor­tant to take the lead in this rela­tion­ship, rather than being rail­road­ed into accept­ing a solu­tion that’s poor­ly suit­ed to your firm’s needs.

“We iden­ti­fied our own work­ing process­es and what was impor­tant to us as a busi­ness,” she says. “Then they helped us to iden­ti­fy the solu­tion that best met our require­ments.”

If he had his time over again, Har­grave would have embraced the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion even soon­er. “I think we could prob­a­bly have start­ed this six months to a year ear­li­er and reaped the ben­e­fits of that,” he says.

Strik­ing when the appetite is there is one way to ensure a smooth dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion – so what are you wait­ing for?