Free private consulting sessions for SMEs who need advice on going into e-commerce to be offered

The e-Committee's roundtable luncheons and workshops continued to be extremely popular throughout the year, e-Committee Chairman Cindy Cheng reported at this year's AGM.

The committee organised a total of 24 roundtable luncheons, which attracted an average audience of not less than 75. Moreover, a special series of five e-workshops and a major conference co-ogranised with the government's ITSD called "Fresh Impetus of e-Commerce" helped the committee accomplish its goal of enabling SMEs to better understand e-commerce solutions.

To chart the future course of the e-Committee, Mrs Cheng said that two surveys were conducted. The first the surveys was on the status of e-commerce adoption and the SMEs understanding of the value proposition. The second one focused on e-commerce skills and resources, or the lack of it.

"From the first survey, we realized that our SME members' understanding of the value proposition of e-commerce was weak so the committee organized the e-workshops series to serve the purpose," she said. "Based on the second survey, we strongly supported the importation of skilled IT people from China because our members have been suffering from the lack of resources and skills to help them implement e-commerce solutions."

Mrs Cheng also said that the committee has started to collect information on solutions based on industry and functionality.

To date, 12 case studies of SMEs deploying e-commerce solutions have been collected, shared amongst committee members, and posted on the Chamber's Web site. Work on collecting more case studies will continue to build a solid roadmap to guide SMEs in selecting e-commerce solutions.

For the future, roundtables and workshops will continue to be organised.

"In addition, to leverage expertise of different committee members, we will pilot run one-hour free private consulting sessions for SMEs who need advice on their planning to go into e-commerce," Mrs Cheng said.

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