With regard to adoption of ICT technologies, information and communication technologies, in small and medium-sized companies, one of the big barriers is lack of sophistication in understanding the technologies themselves. Larger organizations will have dedicated departments with chief information officers who can help the organizations identify and adopt new technologies. Smaller organizations tend to employ more generalists, who don't have the sophistication in understanding the technology. Canada lags behind many other OECD countries, including the U.S., in the use of ICT technologies in our businesses.
That gap has been widening over the last few years. CANARIE has taken a step to try to help smaller companies understand newer technologies like cloud computing by allowing companies to use the CANARIE network and CANARIE facilities and to learn from CANARIE experts so that they can adopt these technologies more readily in their business.