Abstract
M.Com. (Business Management)
It is of importance to establish the need companies, institutions or organisations have for information to satisfy a specific purpose. Research studies that focus on information needs are conducted to assist in providing improved, effective and relevant services to the customers who need and use information. Establishing and understanding the information needs of Small, Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) in intended to assist in providing insight and intelligence to institutions that offer business support services to SMMEs. The intelligence from the research can then be used to align the services offered to the SMMEs to be more effective, efficient and needs-based (Savolainen, 2017:3). The purpose of this research study was to establish what information SMMEs need when making use of the services of the University of Johannesburg Centre for Entrepreneurship (UJCfE). An overview of the importance of SMMEs is provided as a basis to clarify the importance of establishing the information needs and seeking behaviour of SMMEs. Having provided an outline of the importance of SMMEs in a developing country such as South Africa, it was further highlighted what the importance of information to SMMEs is. In addition, an overview of possible challenges SMMEs encounter with availability and access to information was provided. The study is based on the Customer Focus Theory (CFT), in this case the customer being the SMMEs. The CFT considers the customer’s identify location, personality and organisation’s experience, where applicable. Furthermore, the theory places emphasis on the process of gathering, understanding and using customer requirements and information as well as accepting and using feedback from the customer to improve customer service. The study followed a qualitative research design with the use of a self-administered questionnaire as the data collection instrument. The questionnaire was sent through electronic mail (email), with an option to complete an online Google form or hard copy of the questionnaire, to 434 SMMEs on the University of Johannesburg Centre for Entrepreneurship (UJCfE) database. Based on the data collected from the online and print questionnaire, the data was analysed following a descriptive statistics analysis method through identifying similarities, differences, categories and themes from the responses.