Developing a Profile of Small-Medium Companies in Leveraging IT for Sustainable Competitiveness

Abstract

As outlined in Malaysia Economic Transformation Program (ETP), business sector is expected to play crucial role to harness the potential of globalization and to escalate national economic growth. Considering its domination over 98% of total established businesses, SME sector become essential to drive the government’s agenda. Apart from human resource, financing, innovativeness, and legal environment, availability of timely and relevant information in support of business’s decision making is highly crucial for ensuring its competitiveness. Accessibility to the relevant information helps firms to lower their operating cost, to effectively manage available resources and ultimately to improve overall productivity. Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) has been recognized as one of the potential means to supply information for timely business decision making. Despite growing importance of IT/IS for firm’s competitiveness, SMEs embrace constant challenges to deploy IT/IS effectively and thus hardly to optimize its strategic values. Consequently, IS planning is getting paramount to promote effective management of IT/IS within SME sector. Thus, this study proposes a study that investigates the current state of IS planning practices and the factors affecting the IS Planning success among Malaysian SMEs. Adapting IS planning framework of large organizations, this study proposes IS planning framework that is applicable for SMEs environment. The developed framework could facilitate SMEs to effectively manage IS planning as to ensure greater strategic benefits of IT/IS deployment.