Feather Partnership was contracted for a number of months to the Sheffield City Region Growth Hub in 2020/21, where they supported local SME’s businesses on digital and technology adoption.
The Yorkshire Insider approached Feather Partnership through recommendations from the work they had carried out and the editorial below features in their August 2022 edition.
The Covid-19 era forced many organisations to accelerate digital transformation as a survival mechanism. Local business leaders discuss the technologies they’ve adopted to build resilience
Feather Partnership advises businesses in Yorkshire and the East Midlands on IT solutions and technology adoption in order to improve productivity and growth.
Discussing the common barriers to digital transformation, managing director, Mark Scattergood-Cawar tells Insider: “It depends on the size of the company. If it’s at the smaller scale, I’d usually find the biggest challenge is resources and skills. Does the organisation have the capacity to implement tech? And does it have the capability, whether that be using internal people or knowing where to look to get those skills and services?”
The pandemic prompted some SMEs to take the first step towards digital transformation – moving away from paper-based systems, says Scattergood-Cawar, who adds that many are yet to follow suit. “For some businesses, you can start right at the very beginning. So you know how to send an email or WhatsApp – what happens if we could send a digital form and automate data? We take that information, we transform it and then some reports or you feed it into a third-party system. Explaining that journey for people was mind-blowing and useful for them.” He stresses the importance of training and involving staff on new technology from the outset. “Whoever is going to touch that system has got to understand how they’re going to interact with it,” he says. “Find your enablers; it’s not just the senior stakeholders you need to be worried about, it’s the people that are actually going to use it. Project manage it, look at your resources and make sure you’ve got the right skills.
If you would like to learn more, follow this link to Yorkshire Insider.
