The Role Of Accessible Technology Stacks In Bridging The Digital Divide
The Aotearoa New Zealand government-funded Digital Boost Alliance, in collaboration with Alliance members Ricoh, Spark, and The Warehouse Group, recently announced a hardware tech stack developed specifically to support small businesses. The stack, which includes technology from Ricoh, HP & Intel® has been carefully calibrated to help businesses bridge the digital divide
that currently cuts through New Zealand business.
“The businesses that are already embracing digital technologies are also typically the ones who see the benefits of making greater use of them in future – while the businesses that are using digital technologies the least typically have less desire to do more,” research from the New Zealand government found.
The response to those findings was the launch of Digital Boost, an initiative to bring government and industry together to better educate New Zealand’s small businesses on digital opportunities.
That project has, so far, yielded some impressive results:
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39% of users who engaged weekly with the platform report increased revenues
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89% of users plan on continuing to use the platform.
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80% of Digital Boost businesses now have a website where many didn’t previously.
Where the Digital Boost Stack Fits in
The idea of the Digital Boost Stack is to save small businesses from the “paralysis of choice.” Small businesses typically don’t have dedicated IT professionals on staff, and so, when they do look at the digital opportunity, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer weight of information and choice on the market.
To respond to this challenge, Ricoh, HP, & Intel®, in collaboration with the Digital Boost Alliance and The Warehouse Group, have created a “one size fits all solution” that small businesses can adopt and be confident that it will further their digital ambitions.
These stacks include technologies such as laptops, printers, routers, phones, screens and key digital software, such as cloud-based accounting.
But the value-add goes far deeper than simply provisioning complimentary technologies. The stack is fulfilled after a 15-minute consultation that The Warehouse Group offers. This allows them to produce a report that identifies gaps in the small business’ current hardware. The business owner can then use this as a guide to fill in any gaps in their technology.
How the Digital Boost Stack Allows Small Businesses to Embrace Transformation
Once in place, the Ricoh, HP & Intel® technologies in the small business Digital Boost Stack can begin leveraging digital transformation, with guidance from the Digital Boost platform, which features hundreds of training videos to get businesses started.
Some of the best starting points for small businesses include:
- Using technology to build a web presence.
Through using the Digital Boost Stack, a small business will have the resources to get a website running efficiently. In addition, it will be able to generate the content – text, video and more – that will allow that Website to stand out to customers.
2. Embracing social media
Social media provides small businesses with another exceptional – and free – tool for marketing and networking. Whether it’s finding potential business partners over LinkedIn, or participating in the Facebook marketplaces, small businesses that can create and distribute content over social media will see a bump in interest and business.
As with building a website, embracing social media requires performance equipment for creating and then uploading content. In addition, it requires software (and likely cloud-based services) to present the content well. The Digital Boost Stack technologies facilitate this.
3. Taking advantage of cloud technologies.
For small businesses, video conferences can mean additional revenue opportunities in consulting fees. Elsewhere, being able to design aesthetically pleasing collateral via cloud graphical design solutions can boost marketing efforts, while AI tools like ChatGPT can boost productivity. Finally, cloud storage and wireless connectivity allow the small business owner to work from anywhere, and at any time.
Cloud services can be a poor user experience with the wrong technology and configurations, as they can be slow and insecure. The Digital Boost Stack, meanwhile, assumes that cloud services are on the agenda, and has been built around this objective.
Ricoh, HP, Intel®, and other industry and government participants in the Digital Boost programme are developing ways to help small businesses take those first steps into digital transformation. By providing a ready-made stack of technologies configured toward digital innovation, New Zealand’s small businesses have a new, rapid pathway to transformation open to them.
Learn more about Ricoh’s solutions for small businesses and the Digital Boost hardware stack here.
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