Small companies or independent employees of larger companies can get a leg up by intelligent use of new technology
Paulina Borsook and Michael Nadeau
According to the U.S. Statistical Abstract, 97.8 percent of all nonresidential businesses are classified as small businesses (100 or fewer employees). Of those, says research firm IDC, about 67 percent own PCs. To stay in the market with larger, more powerful competitors, these small businesses must do things better, cheaper, and faster. The same holds true for large companies' independently run satellite offices. The best hope of these small businesses, next to their wits, is to make better use of new technology than their larger competitors.
Sure, large companies have their multimillion-dollar enterprise networks, but this kind of infrast
ructure comes at a price: inflexibility. Before it can implement new technology, a large company must show that it will both provide a payback and be compatible with existing infrastructure. The evaluation process can take years.
Small companies can quickly justify and implement new technology, which gives them new competitive tools to reach customers and suppliers, to access numerous resources, or to do administrative chores more efficiently. Take communications, for example. Low-cost options now allow small offices to implement conferencing using both voice and data on the same line (see "Doing It All on One Line"), or to integrate Caller ID features into their applications (see "Caller ID Goes to Work").
Even applications commonly found in large companies can give smaller organizations a boost when used innovatively. For example, few large companies go to the lengths to optimize the effectiveness of E-mail as has Orbit Software (Danville, CA), a highly decentralized international provider of
backup and storage software for Hewlett-Packard 3000 and 9000 machines. The seven-person Orbit sales office and corporate headquarters is connected by a 56 Kbps line to the R&D site 40 miles away in Novato, which itself maintains 19.2 Kbps connections to programmers working in Oakland and San Jose, as well as in Seattle, Washington. What's more, dial-up E-mail connections exist between headquarters and each of the seven international Orbit offices, each only staffed by about three people. Any office can connect to any other Orbit office at any time.
Orbit uses E-mail to provide better service to customers: When a client is having a problem that the local Orbit office can't solve, E-mail provides company president David Merit with instant and complete documentation of the problem by the time he gets the customer on the phone. In fact, it's likely he's been monitoring the problem through E-mail as it developed. E-mail might also allow an Orbit staffer in Singapore to solve the problem of a customer in Be
lgium. "People are really impressed by our E-mail system," says Merit. "They tell us 'even HP doesn't do this!'"
Winning an account or getting a product to market first often means having access to the information you need when you need it. One resource still very much under-used by many large companies is the Internet. Not only is the Internet a vast storehouse of information, it can also serve as a low-rent storefront for many business. "The Virtual Storefront" explains how to get the right Internet connection as well as how to set up an on-line shop.
Performing everyday administrative chores such as billing or bookkeeping is not just aggravating; it steals time and resources away from important revenue-generating tasks. This is especially true for small offices that often cannot afford to hire secretaries or accountants. Help is on the way from companies such as Intuit and Peachtree. These companies are using on-line resources and cross-application data links to shave hours off common accoun
ting tasks (see "High-Tech Bookkeeping").
For the small company competing with giants, new technology can be the great equalizer. For the independent employee looking to get ahead, new technology can be a great enabler on the way to the top.
Paulina Borsook is a San Francisco-based writer who has written about security issues for BYTE. Michael Nadeau is a BYTE contributing editor. You can reach them via the Internet at
loris@well.sf.ca.us
and
miken@bix.com
, respectively.
Small-Office Computing
