A Technological Alignment Diagnosis Test (TDAT) for SMEs

This paper presents a test that helps practitioners and researchers to measure ICT alignment in SMEs. Practitioners and researchers have suggested SMEs use ICT in a way less than optimal, wasting important and limited resources. Although researchers have proposed several instruments to solve this problem, they show operative problems when applied to SMEs. We developed and applied a test that helps SME managers to diagnose and measure the misalignment of ICT in their firms. Additionally, we propose the usage of two indicators of misalignment of ICT in SMEs. We applied this test to 34 SMEs of different regions in Chile with positive feedback on behalf of the SME owners. SMEs are less misaligned at a strategic level than at the process level (23.9% and 42.6% respectively). Also, the findings showed statistically significant differences of alignment between firms of different regions. An open question: whether it is possible that in SMEs the process-level alignment delivers more information than strategic level alignment.