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Over the last decade, the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the European economy has gradually been recognized. At the same time, information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) have opened up new business opportunities for some SMEs, while others are fighting for survival. Apart from economic variables like company size, industry or capital funding (or lack thereof), management awareness of the dangers and opportunities posed by IS and IT and the abilities of IT personnel to react to these have been shown to play a major role in the future of many SMEs. Based on the empirical and theoretical findings by a vari-ety of authors, this paper will propose a model for assessing the value of IT personnel in SMEs. First, the strategic context in which IS are deployed in a company must be addressed because it is a major determinant of the value of IS to the company and of the types and levels of skills necessary in its employees. The "focus-dominance model" developed and tested by (Levy et al. 2001) will be discussed and used to cluster SMEs according to stra-tegic focus and costumer dominance. Second, the "competitive advantage provided by IS" is proposed for meas-uring the success of IS in a company. The main advantage of using this measure is the fact that it has already been validated and used in an exploratory analysis by (Byrd et al. 2001) which strives to show how IS success is affected by IT personnel skills. The skills will be clustered using four dimensions: (1) technology management skills, (2) business functional skills, (3) interpersonal skills and (4) technical skills. (Lee et al. 1995) This frame-work has been used repeatedly in studies on IT personnel skills, e.g. by (Byrd et al. 2001), and therefore allows referring to said empirical studies. In addition to skill dimensions, skill levels - which have been neglected in much of the previous research on IT personnel skills - will be included in the model. The approach by (Dreyfus et al. 1987) and the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA Foundation) will be discussed. It is expected that future empirical tests of the model will show that value and success of IS depend on available skill levels, while the availability of more highly skilled employees may be restricted due to lack of funding. When the model proposed here is tested empirically, it is hoped that it will provide some guidance to SME managers regarding their IS/IT personnel investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]