Italian SMEs and e-business
According to a recent e-business survey, Italian SMEs are focusing on business to business (B2B) e-commerce, but do not perceive software vendors and system integrators to be strategic partners in the process of developing e-business solutions. The research was carried out by Assintel and involved a sample of 1000 Italian companies, 700 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and 300 software companies. More than 50 per cent indicated B2B e-commerce as the most important activity in their e-business initiatives, followed by corporate portals and e-learning. Only a small minority of companies indicated any interest in e-recruiting and mobile commerce. The majority of the companies (60 per cent) chose to build their e-business solutions from scratch, while only a minority used existing, ready-to-go solutions. Despite initial scepticism, e-business is turning out to be a profit centre for Italian SMEs. The research found out that e-business contributed at 30 per cent to the bottom-line for 38 per cent of the companies interviewed, especially in the industry, commerce, public administration, and financial service sectors. While Italian companies believe in the strategic importance of e-business applications, they so not seem to place the same importance on the developers of the software. In fact, most of the respondents said that they only wanted software companies to propose solutions, while 18 per cent said that they should only limit themselves to following their clients' instructions. Only 16 per cent considered software companies to be a strategic partner. Some of the reasons for this include an unclear understanding of the objectives, and overshooting of the project's budget.
Countries
Italy