IT Market Dynamics, the research arm of the IT in Canada media network, has just released a new white paper on collaboration in the SMB market. Entitled “Collaboration and the Canadian SMB,” the report is based on a survey of 346 non-IT business managers and executives, including nearly 250 representing small and mid-sized organizations. The white paper also includes informative commentary from Microsoft Canada’s Vineet Parmar, who adds perspective to the statistics drawn from the survey results.
ITMD believes that the non-IT vantage point captured in this survey is essential to understanding the status and direction of collaboration within the SMB community. As is seen in the survey, SMB businesspeople do not respond to IT-focused descriptions of collaboration in the same way that their IT colleagues or managers with larger organizations. They are focused on the capability, not the technology categories that are used to define the underlying platform. As a result, the white paper provides a much truer picture of how collaborative tools are viewed and used within Canadian SMBs than would similar efforts based on surveys focused strictly on IT professionals or larger enterprises.
“Collaboration and the Canadian SMB” is organized into five sections, each covering a key aspect of usage, deployment, and business perceptions:
- The current state of collaboration technology, through the eyes of business management provides survey findings from a question asking respondents whether their organizations currently use collaboration systems – and if so, whether they do or do not “contribute significantly to success.” This section also uses the results of a 2010 survey of more than 600 IT managers to provide a contrasting view on usage and usefulness.
