This document gives a brief summary in English of the Do IT project.

The Do IT project is an Interreg II pre-project.

The regions covered by the project are county Jämtland in Sweden and the counties Sør-Trøndelag and Nord-Trøndelag in Norway. The whole region is called the Nordic Green Belt. The project consortium is composed of higher educational institutions, organising tailor made educational measures, industry and commerce, responsible for proposing relevant development projects and public authorities, giving economic and structural support both for the development of new IT based businesses as well as new educational offers. The duration of Do IT is from November 1998 to Desember 2000.

The overall objective for Do IT is to make the use of ICT a competitive advantage for the region. In the pre-project the aim is to identify and concretise activities to strengthen the IT competence in the region, especially covering the SME’s. There will be focus on practical IT skills. During the pre-project we want to discover competence gaps and needs and develop networks between industry and commerce, local government administration and colleges and universities in the region. Some minor pilot projects will be run.

Mid Sweden University ( Mitthøgskolan )

Nord-Trøndelag College ( Høgskolen i Nord-Trøndelag )

Sør-Trøndelag University College ( Høgskolen i Sør-Trøndelag)

The Computer Associations:

The Norwegian Computer Society/ Trøndelag branch (Norway)

IT Jämtland Län (Sweden)

NHO - Confederation of Norwegian Business and Industry
Counties and municipalities

The project aims at increasing the awareness of the new E-economy, and competence in SMEs in using ICT. There are also several other target groups:

• SMBs in general, using ICT as a tool for their trading activities
• IT related SMB’s or suppliers of IT products or services
• The public sector, supporting business development
• The higher educational institutions, as competence suppliers and development partners for the companies.

The lack of IT competence in local industry is well documented, both by research as well as in public journals. The challenge is for the companies to be able to compete not only in a local marked place, as to day, but also, nationally and internationally. Most of the companies in the region are small, from 5 to 50 employees. It is very important for them to be able to increase their ICT knowledge, whilst they are doing their normal activities and production. It is therefor also very important that the higher educational institutions are able and willing to deliver competence at the workplace, adapted to the needs of the SME’s. In the Do IT project we will utilise and further develop an Open and Distance Learning methodology, developed and used in several Norwegian and European projects, see for instance the Socrates EuroCompetence project : http://www.tisip.no/ec/. Here the companies can compose their own study plan, and have all the course modules delivered from a pool of courses, supported by a consortium of higher educational institutions, all delivered over Internet.

The following activities are planned for in the pre-project:

• Local development seminars
• ICT and rural development in an international perspective
• Existing ICT competence in the local society – a survey

1. Identification of Competence gaps
2. Targeted SWOT analyses locally
3. Projects and actions listed on the Web

• Establish a project pool with pilot projects for the main Do IT project
• Establish a Web site for Do IT, useful both as place for internal communication and documentation as well as for external communication and dissemination, http://idb.hist.no/do-it/
• Making a report documenting findings and proposing further actions
• Evaluation

The development seminars are organised to have close and direct contact with the local users. The seminars have several functions, like establishing networks, give information about how e-Commerce will influence on industry and trade and get feedback from the SME’s about their needs and discuss ways of increasing the competence in ICT and how to use and implement new IT based services in the Companies. The seminars are followed up by the survey, and also in depth SWOT analyses in selected areas.

In this short English presentation, only one of the activities are described in more detail:

The aim of this activity is to conduct a preliminary study and trend survey of the international development in the following areas:

• Changes in society and in industry and commerce as consequence of extensive use of ICT
• New ways of organising business, collaboration to increase competence and working together in networks
• Discover how the interplay between the technological and the organisational dimension will be to achieve future development, like IT in Ireland case.

The source for the study will be relevant R&D reports, information available on the Internet, direct contact with relevant R&D institutions. Important policy making institutions will be, in addition to EU, OECD and the World Bank.

In relation to the study, the activity includes a visit ( Study tour ) to an area where there has been a lot of successful development, like in Ireland. The aim of such a visit will be to have a closer look at the role of public administrations and other actors have had to achieve the results.

  S-T College