A new £500,000 initiative is promising to help hundreds of Black Country companies maxmise their use of IT and unlock the power of superfast broadband.
Optimising Business Technology (OBT) – delivered by Winning Moves and the National Business to Business Centre as part of the Black Country Growth Hub offer – will officially launch on November 10th at a high profile event featuring digital expert Grant Leboff of Stickymarketing.com.
The programme is free to eligible businesses and will engage with over 1000 firms through a mix of interactive seminars, best practice sharing workshops and one-to-one diagnostics and support.
It has been designed to educate companies, from all sectors of the economy, to the advantages of adopting IT systems that are suited to their business, as well as identifying the huge operational benefits of switching to superfast broadband.
It is anticipated that the change in working practices resulting from the programme will create up to 100 jobs and increase productivity by £3m.
“This isn’t getting companies to invest in technology for the sake of it, this is about making sure they have access to the best possible IT to help them achieve better efficiencies, improve customer service and, importantly, boost sales…all from using technology that is readily available to them,” explained Richard Lowe, who is heading up the initiative.
“The programme offers a whole host of support, from group learning sessions to on- the-ground mentoring and detailed diagnostics. All of this is free for eligible businesses to tap into and we have funds in place to support hundreds of companies between now and July 2015.”
He went on to add: “Effective use of IT is proven to boost the performance of growing organisations and we want to make sure the Black Country has the necessary tools at its disposal to continue its recovery.”
Optimising Business Technology, which is funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership’s Growing Places fund, starts with a programme of workshops covering numerous issues, including digital marketing, making the most of social media, implementing new IT systems and approaches to driving efficiency and productivity.
Companies can then take advantage of up to 15 hours of free one-to-one expert support where an IT advisor will visit the business and review the effectiveness of existing systems through a specially created diagnostic process.
They will then develop an action plan free of charge and identify low and no cost improvements and provide support to make these a reality.
Richard went on to add: “Alongside this, we will also be discussing superfast broadband, with 62% of Black Country firms now able to access it…that’s about 12,300 companies.
“There’s nowhere near this level adopting it so we want to find out the barriers preventing them from connecting. Perhaps it is about not understanding what it offers and how much it costs, it may even be about not fully appreciating what it can bring to the business.”
He concluded: “All the evidence suggests that tech savvy businesses grow faster and employ more people. This programme will help Black Country businesses to take advantage of the opportunity that technology offers, especially as we move towards a more value added economy and global customers wanting everything faster and often cheaper.”