Affiliation:
1. University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Abstract
ICT in SME development, especially in the human resource function, is crucial to business growth and sustainability. During COVID-19, SMEs had to very quickly migrate to more digital platforms. COVID-19 affected the business arena world-wide, small businesses included. SMEs were very hard hit by COVID-19 because of the harsh lockdowns and shut downs by governments during the pandemic. Not all businesses in South Africa were allowed to operate during some of the Levels 5 and 4 and even 3 lockdowns. As more information was being filtered during 2020 by the World Health Organization, who provided direction on the pandemic, decisions were made by governments accordingly to keep their citizens safe and at home during the lockdowns so that the over-burdened medical sectors would not collapse. This chapter explores ICTs in SMEs, ICTs utilized in SME HR function, how ICTs impacted organizations during COVID-19, and how SMEs adopted to digitization and online-training to survive in a disruptive environment like the pandemic.
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