Lies, damned lies and surveys - Opinion

Did you know that 46 per cent of Scottish companies are on the Internet? That 61 per cent have access to e-mail? Wonderful, isn't it? The report's official, so it must be true ...

These are figures advertising a survey entitled Moving into the Information Age which was produced for Scottish Enterprise. It is a companion to a UK-wide study for the DTI's Information Society Initiative.

Look closely at the methods they use and you can see that the results were doubly weighted towards larger companies. And what is the impact of this weighting? Let's take e-mail as an example. The statistics that don't make it into the press releases show that only 20 per cent of 'very small' UK businesses were using external e-mail. Remember that nearly three-quarters of UK businesses are 'very small', and suddenly that '61 per cent connected' starts to look more than a little puzzling.

Why does this matter? Well, these reports are carried out for key official bodies who then decide how to dole out money to help businesses thrive. If you are under the delusion that over 60 per cent of businesses are already using e-mail, you might decide to give less support at the basic level, since most businesses are already there.

The hype may sell Scotland as a cool, wired country, but it doesn't do much for the majority of very small businesses who wouldn't recognise themselves by this description.

An alternative view comes from a study about to be completed by the University of Strathclyde in partnership with South Bank University and with funding from the British Library. This survey looks at the use of the Internet by about 30 companies, based in Glasgow and London, who already had an Internet connection. All the companies in the survey have fewer than 100 employees and they come from a wide range of industries, including printing, legal firms, ship design, dental practice, marketing, ceramic tile importers and so on. The sample is far too small to support meaningful generalisations. Still, it is interesting that common themes emerged strongly.

It soon became obvious that a tick on a questionnaire saying 'I'm connected to the Internet' did not always equate to really using the Internet. Some of the companies were using the Web and e-mail as part of their daily routines. For example, a hotel promoted itself on the Internet, and used e-mail for menu information and salary details. Another firm was e-mailing technical drawings around the world.

However, some couldn't get online because they were using an ancient browser or a poor Internet service provider. One participant was unable to use e-mail for weeks because of a software problem, another overwrote her English-language web browser with a Spanish version by mistake ...

Without technical expertise the cause of a problem may not be obvious. Few very small companies can afford to employ a technical specialist. And if you can't get online for more than five minutes together, downloading the latest version of Netscape is not an option (even if you knew that's what you needed).

Small businesses are by definition small. They have no spare capacity. As one businessman comments: "It's a problem in a small business, isn't it? You've got to be the IT man, you've got to be the health and safety man, there's no-one you can ask."

Businesspeople are very conscious of the value of their time. In particular, those in small business are having to multi-task. So you can't learn by 'surfing'. "Even if you have the time, two minutes later there's somebody standing at your desk wanting something and you have to click off," was how one manager put it.

It's commonplace now to talk about an 'attention economy': it's people's attention that is scarce and valuable. The US company CyberGold, for example, has a patent for 'attention brokerage'. This means paying customers for giving attention to a marketing message.

Therefore it's no surprise to find intolerance about the 'world wide wait'. Slow loading pages ("I give up and try something else") and sites that "won't run unless you download a particular gizmo" are a real turn-off. For non-techies, the cost of installing and virus-checking new 'free' software is high.

The point here is that small businesses like this need help. This is not because the people running them are slow on the uptake or incapable of dealing with change, but because they are busy people who need a strong motivation to get to grips with technology which is time-consuming to learn about, often doesn't yield results and can crash their other systems.

Nevertheless, they do see the benefit: "It's time saving. Despite all we've said about it being slow and the rest of it. Having instant access to information is useful," was one comment.

There are good things being done for small business at the local level. However, if officials spent a bit less time hyping, and more time helping, things could be better, even sooner, for small business.

For further information see: Spectrum Strategy Consultants for Scottish Enterprise, Moving into the Information Age: an International Benchmarking Study for Scotland 1998 (www.spanscot.org.uk/ assets/span.pdf). The UK report is on the DTI's Information Society Initiative site at www.isi.gov.uk/isi/bench/ mitia/ index.html. The business information and the Internet project Web site can be found at: business.dis.strath.ac.uk.

Sheila Webber is a Lecturer at the Department of Information Science,
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
(e-mail sheila@dis.strath.ac.uk), but writes in a personal capacity.