Lack of IT support costs SMEs £164 million per day

Samsung has published the results of its first 'UseIT Survey', which examines how workers are actually using IT in the workplace and how this affects issues such as productivity, health and security.

In partnership with YouGov the UK wide survey polled over 2,000 office workers from a range of business sectors looking at measuring their attitudes, opinions and issues they have with everyday IT office equipment.

In the section relating to SMEs and how they work with IT equipment, the results highlight that the majority of SMEs and self-employed workers currently function with little IT support and are left to tackle front end IT issues without consulting an IT expert. Subsequently the time spent by employees on fixing IT issues signifies a worryingly high cost to SMEs.

The key findings from the research, from 600 respondents are as follows:
 

• 90% work in an office environment, yet 51% of don’t have an IT department
• 84% of those self-employed don’t have any IT support
• SME workers spend up to an hour a day fixing IT problems or waiting for IT equipment to fire up
• 89% are confident they can change printer toner, 63% are confident they can retrieve lost information from a PC or laptop and 73% believe they can set up their monitor for optimum viewing
• 83% try and fix a printer when a printer jams, without consulting an IT department