Assessment of the factors influencing adoption of E-business technology by SMEs in Tanzania

ICT plays a prominent role in the field of business and trade nowadays. While the developed world forges ahead with e-transformation of businesses, the developing world struggles to keep pace with emerging technologies. This work seeks to assess the factors influencing adoption of e-business technology by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Tanzania. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used in gathering the data for this study. A total of 14 SMEs were included in the sample whereby CEOs, IT managers, systems personnel, or equivalent, and owners or managers were involved. The questionnaires were administered to the chief executives of the enterprises, line managers, and other sampled employees of the enterprises. The researcher also conducted interviews with these respondents. This study has dealt with primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected from fourteen SMEs. This paper provides sound evidence that SMEs can gain competitive advantage through adoption of e-business technology on most of their operations. More than 70 per cent of the respondents identified e-business as aiding their business in one or more of the accepted competitive areas. However, there is potential for SMEs to gain further advantages by using an integrated strategies approach in their adoption of e-business. SMEs generally are not utilizing ICT fully, so as to gain competitive advantage, lacking the resources, and makes the IS/IT strategy approach to gain competitive advantage, lacking the resources, and skills to do so. This lack of skills applies in both the technical and business areas, and makes the IS/IT strategy approach to gaining competitive advantage largely unworkable in SMEs, in its current format. Therefore, this result suggested that these SMEs require support in knowledge management to achieve the goal. This support may be in terms of education, training, and developing new tools and methods to acquire and manage knowledge in SMEs. The study suggest recommendations to both policy makers and the practitioners. There should be a well articulated policy which will focus to encourage the development of SME specific tools to encourage lower e-business costs.