• "SMEs are not very IT-focused. For many, IT is an after-thought. Part of the reason is that these enterprises do not necessarily have a dedicated IT department. Most of the decisions are made by the owner-managers or the finance people. As such, the use of IT is limited largely to some of the four basic needs -- email, productivity applications (word processor and spreadsheet), accounting and a website.



• SMEs are hard to reach. They are small and distributed. While it is easy to get to the large companies (and for the large companies to get to the IT vendors), SMEs are a hard market to crack.



• SMEs tend to still follow processes which are largely non-electronic. Because the organizations are small, the business knowledge is more tacit than in digital form. People, especially the senior management, "know" what is happening (and all that needs to be known). This also concentrates decision-making. So, IT's role needs to be to assist in this decision-making process.



• SMEs need more hand-holding and support, and thus can be very demanding customers. This is because they may not necessarily have trained in-house IT staff. At the same time, their ability to pay is quite limited. Hence, as customers, they have been an unattractive market for the IT vendors.



• The most important issue facing SMEs is business growth. They have a fairly close tab of the expenses, so there is little room for optimisation there. The challenge is to generate new business, and manage that new business with the same (or incremental) staff so as to maximise profitability.



• It is not easy for SMEs to educate themselves about new technologies and the impact they can have on their business. While there are all kinds of training institutions for computer languages and software packages, the one segment that still has been addressed on the training side is the business applications of technologies.



• [They have] an even lower ability to spend. They typically need solutions which are a fraction of the cost of what has been available so far."

"Government money, though, is a totally different story -- DARPA, NIST ATP, SBIR, the whole alphabet soup. It's really not the private sector that's boosting the industry right now. It's government spending. And that's a fairly normal phenomenon for an industry in its early phase. The government props it up, encourages it, gets R&D moving in the lab, helps it along into the startup phase, and then the Darwinian world of business kicks in.

Even there, though, startups can live to see another day primarily through government grants. And right now, the military is where the money is at. Shop your nanomaterial around and tell a VC that your superstrong, superlight nano-enhanced polymer would be useful for garage doors, and you might be shown the door. But go to DARPA and say it can help reinforce tank or aircraft or cockpit doors and can stop a speeding bullet, and you might have an easier time getting some dough."

Editor's note: This is the eighth in our popular weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews of other weblogs...


The Workers Comp Insider is a "weblog about workers' compensation, risk management, business insurance, workplace health & safety, occupational medicine, injured workers, insurance web tools & technology, and related topics."

This blog is a terrific resource on these niche topics. I've already found useful references.

The Workers Comp Insider is published by the employees of Lynch Ryan, a workers compensation firm in Wellesley, Massachusetts on the east coast of the USA. The firm helps businesses -- large and small -- reduce their workers compensation costs.

The Workers Comp Insider is an interesting example of an established business using a weblog to communicate with customers. They do it without obvious commercials.

This is a weblog that leverages subject matter expertise. They provide the kind of in-depth information and analysis of their subject that you would expect of experts in their field.

One of the most useful features about this blog is the collection of link resources. It reminds me of some of the early link sites on the Internet. Remember how useful they could be before they became crassly commercialized with pop-under ads and other annoyances?

You'll find links to the major governmental and industry sites covering occupational safety, workers compensation, and workplace insurance issues.

But you'll also find links to sites you probably never heard of and that only an expert in the field would know of. For instance, there are links to resources for "latex allergy" and "typing injury FAQ" (bloggers, take note, you might need this last one some day).

In one post, they highlighted workstation (computer) ergonomics. The resources cited are off-the-beaten track and excellent.

Lynch Ryan has done a good job integrating the weblog with their commercial website:

• Even though the weblog has its own URL, it is appended to the company's website. Thus, on the commercial website, you find a menu button for the blog.



• They have placed blog headlines on the home page of the commercial website. This is an excellent way to keep the home page fresh, with regularly updated content.



• The blog uses the same color scheme and graphical elements as the company's commercial website.

"Europe is under threat as never before. It is ... globalisation which is forcing the average European employer and worker to compete with their counterparts on the other side of the planet. Regulating labour laws is a stop-gap measure. What needs to happen to revitalise the European economy is that the average European needs to want to contribute to its growth story. If we focus on being net contributors to the system, rather than net-takers from it, we will see the difference."