Rapid tech changes create challenges

Staying abreast of rapidly changing business technologies is a growing challenge for many SMEs.

Steve Richards always makes sure he takes the conversation back to basics when discussing customers’ IT requirements.

Rather than asking IT questions at the start, Mr Richards told Business News it was important to begin with pure business questions.

“What are your plans and needs as a business? You need to understand that first,” he said.

As general manager of IT firm Frontline Services, he has seen that the array of technology choices is bewildering for many businesses.

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“Every business we talk to has IT dependencies and this presents many challenges,” Mr Richards said.

“There has never been such a rapid pace of change in the world, you have disruption in many industries.”

Two recent surveys confirm his impression that many businesses are battling to stay up to speed.

Cisco’s Asia Pacific Digital Maturity Index found that 39 per cent of small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) do not have any digital efforts in place.

In addition, 43 per cent of SMEs are fighting to keep up with the rapid pace of transformation and are digitising just to survive.

An ANZ Bank report, titled ‘The Digital Economy: Transforming Australian Businesses’, also found a mixed take-up of digital technology.

It ranked 44 per cent of SMEs as either ‘digitally confident’ or ‘advanced’, with many of these businesses using digital tools to grow their client base or increase efficiencies.

This was outweighed by the 56 per cent who were either ‘digitally dismissive’ or ‘tentative’.

These businesses did not value digital tools or lacked internal capabilities needed to use digital tools effectively.

The two surveys also shed light on the main challenges faced by SMEs in Australia.

The Cisco survey found the lack of IT talent was the single biggest issue, followed by lack of budget or management commitment, and the lack of a robust IT platform. 

In a similar vein, the ANZ report said the top digital implementation challenges were costs, and a lack of knowledge about how to start.

Cisco’s SME segment leader in Australia Nykaj Nair said ‘fear of IT’ was a phrase he had heard from small business advisers. 

“Fear of IT is not having a trusted adviser to go to so they can start their digitisation journey,” he said.

Of the Australian SMEs to have embraced a digital future, there were some clear trends, according to Mr Nair.

“Two things that came out loud and clear from the Australian SMEs were, number one, they are investing in security, and the reason they are doing that is that they are also investing in the cloud,” Mr Nair said.

“The third thing they are investing in is mobility; by that I mean technologies that allow them to connect, communicate, collaborate within their internal ecosystems and with their customer base.”

The Cisco survey, which covered the Asia Pacific, found Australia leads the region in mobility and use of mobile devices.

That finding accords with the experience of Jawid Dadarkar, who runs South Perth-based IT consulting firm Lindentech.

“Nowadays businesses just expect every application we deploy will be accessible by every device everywhere,” Mr Dadarkar said.

He cited Microsoft Teams and Cisco’s Webex application as products that work across the globe.

Mr Dadarkar has found that size is a good indicator of how prepared businesses are for digital change.

In his experience, small businesses with fewer than 20 people typically are not mature in their IT thinking.

“When they come to us, they don’t really know what they want or what to expect,’” he said.

“On the flipside, we have clients with 20-plus users who come to us with strategic plans and say: ‘This is where we are headed, we need technology to match our business plan’.

Mr Richards agrees that business plans and technology plans need to be linked.

“When you talk about digital transformation, it’s essential to have a roadmap or a plan so there are clear linkages between the business and IT plans,” he said. 

“We help clients objectively look at their business and help them plan for what they need.”

Frontline was established in 2016 by three experienced IT executives, including Empired co-founder Greg Leach.

Mr Richards said the business has achieved rapid growth over the past year, working for a range of clients across multiple sectors, but particularly mining and oil and gas. 

“It’s been a very exciting year,” he said.

Frontline’s growth means it is now ranked among the 25 largest ICT firms in WA, according to the BNiQ database.

The sector ranking is still headed by privately owned Perth-based firm Kinetic IT, which has about 550 ICT staff in WA.

That puts it just ahead of international firm Modis, followed by ASX-listed Empired and another big international player, DXC Technology. 

Frontline’s major projects have included designing, procuring and implementing the entire IT system for a large underground coalmine in Queensland after a change of ownership.

“Our approach is about bringing the experience and disciplines of enterprise-scale IT support and applying it in a fit-for-purpose, agile way to a range of organisations,” Mr Richards said.

To support future growth, Frontline has established partnerships with Telstra and other service providers, implemented a manned 24-7 service desk, and bolstered its management strength.

“We’ve built a fit-for-purpose management structure. Our engineering and service delivery team has grown to around 45 people,” Mr Richards said.

One trend that nearly all businesses are keen to learn more about is cloud computing.

“It’s accepted as an option that everybody should look at,” Mr Richards said. 

However, he cautioned that cloud-only services did not suit all businesses.

“Organisations often assume they should put everything in the cloud. But if, for example, they operate remote sites using satellite links with limited bandwidth, it isn’t going to work,” he said.

Mr Richards added that cloud solutions had many advantages but were not always cost effective.

“It’s been touted as a cheap solution, and it is up to a point, but isn’t necessarily so,” he said. 

“The trick is to select the right mix of platforms to meet each business’s specific needs.”

Mr Dadarkar said he still met business people who were wary of cloud storage, but that most people came around.

“They are realising their offices are far more unsafe than storing in the cloud,” he said.

“People are now more educated on who can and can’t access their data.”

Mr Dadarkar said the major providers of cloud services – Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google, among others – were often interchangeable.

“The choice of product depends on the applications clients have and the storage and bandwidth they will need,” he said.

Mr Dadarkar said small-to-medium business customers were generally after the most secure, agile way of running their technology.

“We do that by providing services from Cisco, Microsoft Azure and Office 365 and taking that enterprise level security and the suite of applications normally installed in an enterprise level environment,” he said.

“We can make the two ends meet.

“We’ve bundled it all together and made it very simple for small businesses to have enterprise level security in their offices.”