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Half of SMEs in the UK waste more than 24 working days a year on activities such as IT, a new survey has found.

The research, conducted by BT, indicates that SMEs could become more competitive by cutting down the amount of time they spent on IT, something that could be achieved by outsourcing their requirements.

BT's new findings echo an earlier study undertaken by the company in partnership with Cisco which reported that 85 per cent of SMEs felt, as they lacked IT expertise, they were losing out to bigger firms.

The same survey found that 58 per cent of SME bosses felt (repetition) that ICT could help them improve their business, but felt they were not able to invest as much as they would like.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.

Double quote marks on these two quotations? Or is that part of the style foe the feed….