Distance Consulting for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

In this paper we report on an European funded project called SOLARE, aimed at defining and developing Distance Consulting services for SME's located in inland areas of Sicily. Starting from the specific needs of the involved enterprises, we have carried out consulting activities through a communication environment based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). There is not a generally accepted definition of Distance Consulting, and for our purposes we consider it as an ICT-based approach aimed at providing enterprises with information, communication and training services in a systematic way; moreover, the use of ICT IO provide consulting services should lead SME's towards e-commerce solutions as well as towards a full integration into the emerging digital economy.