IT Training as a Strategy for Business Productivity: A Framework for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Asia

Though information technology (IT) has offered tremendous benefits to enterprises all over the world, its adoption by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia remains relatively low. There are relatively few examples in the Asian SME segment where high end IT and electronic business (e-business) applications are being used for core business operations and transactions. This non-adoption of IT by these enterprises is a major impediment for enhancing their business productivity. The reasons offered for non-adoption of IT are usually the initial prohibitive cost and the perceived adoption risk. This perceived risk can be minimized by imparting “the right knowledge to the right people at the right time” in these enterprises. This paper explores the various dimensions of this elusive “critical knowledge” and seeks to synthesize the various ideas in literature on change management, training needs analysis and IT adoption to evolve a strategic IT training framework for SMEs. The proposed framework recognizes the differences in IT training requirements for different levels of employees and suggests a differentiated training based on sequence and content for different segments of employees. The proposed training framework provides an actionable and comprehensive tool, which can be, used for imparting the necessary “critical knowledge”, leading to systematic IT adoption and consequently making these enterprises competitive in the global economy by enhancing their business productivity.