Colombia Bit 2007 Survey Results — General Report

The Colombian Telecommunications Research Center (CINTEL) has studied for several years the development of the telecommunications sector in Colombia, a country that within recent years has shown trends toward increasing use of information and communications technologies (ICT). Since 2007, CINTEL has been part of the Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project through an agreement signed with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for the purpose of analyzing the impact of ICT on businesses in Colombia.The survey was conducted among 200 companies (large, medium, and small), of which 9.5% were part of an international group. Most of the companies produced physical products, and most of their clients were other enterprises.The analysis of the adoption of ICT on infrastructure (which was focused on four basic aspects: hardware, software, security, and web) showed that investment in these areas had increased in the years leading up to the survey.The survey showed that Colombian managers considered ICT to be a strategic tool for good performance of their organizations because ICT can help the development of different activities and improve information processing for decision making. More employees were using ICT for performing their labor activities than they were in the previous years, but they also required more training.Regarding customer facing, traditional channels such as face-to-face contact and telephone were the most used.Colombian businessmen preferred direct purchases from either manufacturers or distributors. Online purchase options, such as online auctions, generic markets, and aggregators, were rarely used.Most of the leaders surveyed said that their organizations did not use ICT in their international trade operations.At the time of the survey, Colombian enterprises were increasingly adopting technology among their different processes; this process was more prevalent in large companies than in smaller operations.