Room for improvement – but region still on par with technology

Senior Partner with KPMG, Brenda Pope.

Senior Partner with KPMG Brenda Pope believes that though there is still room for improvement, regional businesses are no worse off than their North American counterparts when it comes to use of integrated technology in the operations.

She told members for the press at an IT conference last week that being able to be technologically up-to-date was of particular importance to small economies such as ours, as the market place tended to be more competitive. However, given that many businesses could not boast of as deep pockets as those to the North, and considering that the cost of bringing the technological products and services here were higher, it was incumbent on businesses to maximise whatever opportunities they had to use technology as a means of increasing productivity and customer experience.

“It's no point having access to software that can come to the mobile and having customers be able to log into Facebook and get twitter notifications [and so on] if we do not manage to turn it on,” she said.

“Having said that, there are some businesses that are right up there, up front when new software comes out and they are on our backs telling us what they want to do. So it depends on the nature of the company, the nature of the management team as to how [the business] buys on to the opportunities [presented to them],” Pope remarked.

Speaking further to trends which the management consultant saw through her work in the region, she noted that Caribbean businesses did not “have any money to waste” and that when the spent resources on business application systems, they were known to “exercise the product until it is dead”.

“When they invest in software, they want to use it end-to-end,” she said of her experience as an on-the-ground Sage/Accpac partner.

“They want try every feature ... they can get but they also want to get the best value for the buck,” the consultant stated. (RA)