Productivity Less Important than Cost Control

If you’ve ever felt that your company is more concerned about pinching pennies than it is about making it easier for you to do your job, a new report confirms your suspicions.

The most pressing technology challenge facing SMBs (small and midsize businesses) is keeping their IT budgets under control, research commissioned by CompTIA (Computing Technology Industry Association) found. Released Nov. 13, the research found that SMBs are also worried about the high cost of IT maintenance, cited by 26 percent of respondents.

But coming in as the third most pressing challenge facing SMBs—cited by only 23 percent of respondents—was using technology products and services to increase worker productivity.

“It’s interesting that productivity is behind the cost issue. The perception may still linger than SMBs aren’t tech-savvy even though in terms of how they do business this is not the case. They’re all networked, they all have PCs and they’re all looking to do more of what they have, so you would think that productivity would have been higher on the scale,” Steve Ostrowski, director of corporate communications for CompTIA, told eWEEK.

Interestingly, according to an earlier CompTIA study, released Oct. 17, a surprising amount of the SMB workforce is mobile—10 percent, on average—something that is often associated with higher productivity, despite managerial fears that out-of-sight employees will slack off. Nearly three out of four SMBs have at least one or more employees telecommuting full-time.