E-Readiness Assessment of Non-Profit ICT SMEs in a Developing Country: The Case of Iran

Abstract

We are experiencing a new kind of commerce in the recent era, known as e-commerce, which considers Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as the main enabler of commerce. Considering Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as micro elements of society and part of macro economy, ICT becomes crucial for e-commerce companies to attain sustainable competitiveness.

Towards this, organizations must re-evaluate every aspect of their strategies and quickly adapt their working models to incorporate e-commerce as an essential factor for their success. SMEs are critical to the economies of all countries, and specially the developing ones. They cannot be left behind and many of them are already demonstrating their entrepreneurship strength by grasping the opportunities offered by ICT.

E-readiness assessment is an evaluation tool that can be used for measuring the diffusion rate of ICT. However, critical issues for e-readiness assessment of SMEs have not been systematically investigated for developing countries. Some existing studies have derived their critical factors from macro perspectives at country level and have not considered the important factors at micro level for SMEs in an integrated way this paper aims to bridge this gap.

This research paper first reviews the e-readiness assessment models proposed for countries at macro scale and then identifies the critical factors for SMEs e-readiness assessment. This is achieved through factor analysis at the micro perspective of some Iranian non-profit ICT SMEs. The extracted factors are organizational features, ICT infrastructures, ICT availability and security and legal environment.

This study is probably the first to provide a perspective of critical issues for e-readiness assessment in SMEs based on macro models in a developing country. It gives valuable insight and guidelines which hopefully will help the managers in developing countries to consider the critical issues for e-readiness assessment of their organization in an effective way.

Keywords: information and communication technology, e-readiness assessment, small and medium enterprise, developing country, Iran