INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIES FOR SMALL BUSINESSES.

Information Technology (IT) provides ready to use, end-to-end solutions and allow small businesses to focus on their core businesses. Recent innovations in IT have positively impacted businesses. With the emergence of web services, the convergence of telecom and computing is finally reaching maturity in a unified platform for doing business in the 21st century. Business enterprises have invested heavily in information technology and the benefits have been well documented. However there is still a dearth in the current literature that analyzes how this digital technology can help small businesses in such areas as business process reengineering and data analytics. This paper seeks to fill this gap and proposes a framework that helps in choosing the appropriate IT strategy. It is essential that business processes are identified based on their cost, complexity, and criticality and then reengineered and automated based on analyzing the domain specific data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]