When Britain’s economy was last in thedoldrums there was a clearculprit – the designer-spectacle-wearing darlings of the dot-com boom. This time round the geeks can breathe a sigh of relief; it is time for the fat-cat bankers to take the flak. In a neatly ironic twist it looks as though it may be the guy from IT – perhaps with worthless dot-com share options poking out of his back pocket – who will help companies to emerge from the current recession. How so? Well, technology has given rise to business models that were unavailable during previous downturns.

Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at the consultancy Capgemini, says the traditional role of IT has been to administer business processes for less cost and greater accuracy in data management. “That pressure continues to be there,” he says, “but for most companies, it is not so easy to take money out.” This has given rise to a move from long-term IT investments, with fixed-cost purchasing of software, to a pay-as-you-go approach, commonly known as “software as a service”.

Take an office-based company of 1,000 people. If only 600 are using a particular word-processing package at any one time, you could let a third party host the application on their web servers. With only 60 per cent of employees accessing the applicationat any one time, a business could save on expensive licence fees.

Mulholland says this pay-as-you-go approach means companies aremoving away from the constant battle over return on investment. Now they can just expand or contract theiruse of IT resources as dictated by the size of the business at any one time.

Another emerging concept is that of business network transformation. It is the idea of blurring the boundaries of the traditional company and considering the wider supply chain instead. Companies that do it well can grow more quickly by being more in touch with their customers and developing new products and services faster while at the same time cutting costs by being closer to suppliers. Technology is the oil that makes business network transformation happen.

Robert Epstein, head of small and medium business sales and marketing at Microsoft UK, says dynamic customer relationship management (CRM) systems are proving popular. “Companies are trying to automate areas of their sales processes, ensuring that renewal reminders are sent to customers and that every customer interaction is tracked,” he says. “A CRM system tracks everything about customers and your interactions with them, looking at which are most profitable and where new opportunities are going to arise.

Social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter are proving popular technologies for entrepreneurs funding new businesses from their redundancy payments. Brad Burton, founder of the business breakfast network 4Networking.biz, says his own business “would not have been able to grow without social technology”. He adds that many of the entrepreneurs he sees around the country are using the same tools. “Keep your costs down and use these social networks; it’s free marketing.”

He feels that social networks are breaking down the barriers between large and small companies. “It’s the relationship economy. The small person now has a voice and the big corporates are in trouble. It’s all very well as a large company sitting in your ivory tower but if you have two months with no sales you are in trouble.”

John Richardson advises on innovation, e-business and design and knowledge transfer for Business Link, the free advice and support service for small to medium-sized businesses.

He says: “We do a lot of work with entrepreneurial students, inventors and other potential business owners. The first thing we say to them is, ‘Do you trade on eBay?’

“eBay can train you to run a business very well. There are marketing, warranty, packaging and branding issues. You make a lot of mistakes and learn the hard way.”

But are smaller companies using the web well? “We still see people who have free e-mail addresses and basic websites that don’t attract customers. A few are using technology really well, they use Skype to communicate and have Facebook and Twitter accounts,” Richardson says.

Another potential technological boost to the economy could come from the details revealed in the Digital Britain report issued last week. In it the Government has committed to providing high-speed broadband to every household in the UK, including those in rural areas.

But how will this help the economy? Research quoted in the report shows that employment in communities with broadband grows 1 per cent faster than those without, while a study for the European Commission estimated that broadband contributed an average of 0.71 per cent to European Union GDP in 2006.