Abstract:

Small and medium enterprises (SME) contribute significantly to a nation’s economy. In Malaysia, about 70% of the national industry is derived from SMEs, which the batik microenterprise is one of the vital groups. The interest in batik microenterprise is due to the Malaysian government intervention to revive the Malaysian batik industry to emphasize Malaysian batik as a cultural entity besides improving the livelihood of batik enterprises which dominate the batik industry. Although it is highly acknowledged the IT can play a pivotal role in reducing business complexity and promoting business growth, majority of the batik microenterprises in Malaysia remains as non-adopters of IT. Research on SMEs productivity recognized the slow rate of IT adoption amongst SMEs and factors that that contribute to the slow adoption. This phenomenon deprives SMEs of gaining advantage through IT adoption in their operational efficiencies, market positioning and increased revenue. Two factors of non-adoption of IT that were identified in the literature are the lack of internal IT knowledge and expertise and the characteristics of IT applications itself. This research argues that the interest on SMEs IT adoption is mainly on the macro perspective of adoption and little emphasis is given to effort of devising effective method that can lead to IT adoption. The continuous work on IT therapy which started as an action research in microenterprise IT adoption shed some light on how to progress towards the development of a method that encourage IT adoption amongst microenterprise. However, the existing work merely treats IT therapy as a set of intervention in action research but did not formalize and develop the method. In this work, a review of IT therapy was made before making the attempt to model the IT therapy using the clinical approach to give it a formal definition. An analysis on thirteen clinical therapy methods was made. A case study was conducted on clinical therapy practice using personal interviews, observation and document reviews as the method to collect the data. From the analysis of the data, the SOAPIE method was finally used as the clinical therapy model. Components of the SOAPIE method were identified and mapped into the IT therapy model to be mapped into the new IT therapy conceptual model. In the modeling process, the scenario of batik microenterprise was used to give a contextual approach that helps visualize the IT therapy. The formalization and refinement of the IT therapy will be useful for devising intervention programs to assist microenterprise to adopt IT in their business operation.