Standardized system solution for micro businesses

The thesis is about exploring possibilities for developing a standardised system solution for micro businesses, this since most of the micro business lack proper system solutions, a contributing factor of this is price and also incompatibility between the solution and the business itself. The system solutions we will refer to are solutions which task is to cover the most important needs that a micro business might have on their system. The main goal with this research is to see if this is possible, and if so, how the developers should think to take it further. We chose to do this by identifying the most significant of needs a micro business has when it comes to this type of system solution. In this thesis we will present three needs which were evaluated and brought forth through the analyses of various interviews and observations we had done during the study. The interviews took place at respective company with their employees and consisted both closed and open questions with our main focus on the open questions because we wanted to obtain as much information from the respondents as possible from several viewpoints. The same goes for the observations, which also took place at respective company, where we studied the routines of each employee as well as how they performed their everyday tasks, which behaviours could be seen and so on. We believe that these needs will make a good foundation for system developers which task lies in the development for micro businesses. The three needs we found the most vital to a successful implementation of systems within micro businesses were; Flexibility, Usability and Affordability. With flexibility we mean that the system solution has to be adjustable to the rapid and spontaneous changes that micro businesses constantly go through. Also the system solution has to be compatible with the rest of the technology that the micro business might have. With this system solution micro businesses should no longer have to go through long changing procedures and spending time in planning how they are going to be done. A standardised system solution will allow micro businesses to easily implement the system solution on demand, without having to worry about any extra expenses that other changes might have resulted in. This is where Affordability comes in. A standardised system solution will not have any bigger effect on the micro businesses in terms of lost efficiency. In fact we believe that a standard solution can lower the cost in a way that will allow for more businesses to utilize system technology. The operating costs will even be lower than before due to the fact that a standardised solution can be used by a broader audience thus allowing covering of more businesses. With Usability we want to underline that the system solution should be easy to integrate with and not too advanced for the user. This also means that the design should be appealing to the user in such a way that it doesn’t feel too difficult or too easy. If a system is to easy then the user could feel as if they were unnecessary and that his or her competence is going to waste. Usability is an important factor to have in mind during development since the IT competence varies from business to business, and person to person. The result of this research is therefore to see which needs are put on a standardised system solution and how web based system solutions can complement micro businesses, in hope of relieving the pressure put on businesses from the technology they have today, and these are; Flexibility, Usability and Affordabilit