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Medium-sized businesses in the UK do not view technology as a useful tool and continue to use IT services in an ad-hoc manner, a new report claims.

Research by Dynamic Markets found that 28 per cent of business managers at these medium-sized businesses admitted that their company has no IT strategy.

Just 18 per cent of the respondents said their firm had a formal IT plan which has been approved by the board - the rest said they tended to operate on an 'as needed' basis.

This is leading to a situation where 55 per cent of business managers in mid-sized companies think their IT set-up is not providing good value for money.

Similarly, 65 per cent of the companies said that IT systems in separate company departments were operated by different systems.

"Having seen how few mid-sized companies had any form of IT strategy in place to support the business, I was not surprised to see the overall negative perception of business managers about their IT infrastructures," explained Paul Cash, the managing director of Partners in IT.

"For companies of this size, it is critical to be able to retain control of their IT spending and investment."

However, recent research from the US suggested that IT security solutions will experience rapid growth in 2007.