DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT - ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION FOR ROMANIAN SMEs IN PANDEMIC

The period imposed by this pandemic, which we are going through, has visibly led to a kind of reconfiguration of our lives; we were forced to quickly fold all our daily activities and habits on a new pattern of life, so that we could go through this challenging period; we have all experienced a deviation of our life, carried out so far in the traditional, real environment, towards a quasi-known and insufficiently exploited environment, namely the digital one; such a forced and rapid transition has brought with it multiple difficulties, starting from a precarious ITC infrastructure, insufficient skills to use the tools of the digital environment and to software solutions and platforms insufficiently adapted for the online environment; starting from these lived realities, in the present study, the aim was to draw an image with a double perspective, pre and during-pandemic on the Romanian SMEs, in their confrontation with the problems brought by this crisis; specific problems were identified, solutions adopted, as well as behavioral changes of the studied companies, in crossing the pandemic period and in their effort to extend the activities to the digital environment, as an alternative to the real pre-pandemic world; the results obtained, we consider that they can be very useful for various categories of users, starting with researchers who can substantiate their extensive studies starting from the set of information delivered through the present study; then, we consider that the results can be used by local and central authorities, but also by companies in various fields of activity in general and those of IT and software development, in particular.