ITAC is comprised of multiple technology companies such as Bell Canada, Dell Inc. and Intel Corp. It held a round table at the Toronto Board of Trade in Toronto last week to discuss Canada’s lack of information and communication and to announce the award ceremony to encourage businesses to use technology.
“We know that while there are many, many examples of excellence using technology to innovate or to completely transform organizations,overall in Canada, we are not using technology at the same rate as other competitor nations,” Courtois said. “We also know that the most persuasive way to encourage organizations to use technology is through peer-to-peer exchange of best practices among companies and other organizations. The Ingenious Awards Program provides a mechanism for facilitating that peer-to-peer exchange in a sustained fashion.”
If an enterprise does not invest in current technology and their employees do not know how to use it, the company would lose money as many small businesses and medium businesses are, according to Doug Cooper, the country manager of Intel Canada. Small-to-medium businesses do not train their employees to be well versed in using the Internet causing them to be less productive and less efficient, he said.
Enterprises only account for 10 per cent of companies in Canada, while 90 per cent of businesses are small businesses. That percentage of companies has less than 100 people employed, according to Courtois.
“They (small-to-medium businesses) do not have people to do that, no money for consulting,” Courtois said.
The lack of investment in information and communication technology is fundamentally because these smaller companies simply do not have the money to spend on acquiring good technology. Small-to-medium businesses also do not have the money to spend on learning how to better use the existing technology to increase their productivity and overall Canada’s profits, according to Courtois.
Smaller companies can opt for using cloud-based services such as software-as-a-service for an alternative to buying software at high costs, according to Courtois. Cloud-based software can be purchased at relatively low costs, so a company made up of a single individual can access it just as employees of a company of 100,000 employees can access it.
