DAVID HARBOURNE, chief executive of North Yorkshire TEC looks at the new regional business group which aims to put the sigh into sci fi.

PREDICTING the future is a notoriously risky business. Fifty years ago, the comic-strip vision of the year 2000 had people wearing silver suits, travelling in flying cars and living in cities in the sky. Inter-planetary travel was expected to be commonplace. Meals would be taken as tiny pellets bursting with any chosen flavour. How much of this has come true?

On the other hand, how many people would have confidently predicted that vast numbers of people would be communicating using battery-powered, wireless phones? Or that the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica could be held on one shiny disk? Or that a baker in Whitby could receive orders from all over the world via a type of television screen linked to a white box and a phone line?

Predictions based purely on today's technology may fall wide of the mark, because technological change happens fast and rarely in a straight line. At the same time, new technology can speed up current business processes; or it can enable us to fundamentally rethink how we do things. Successful prediction therefore calls for an element of lateral thinking: if we have more of X, could we use it as an opportunity to do Y?

People from businesses and organisations of all types have formed a partnership called CoMPRIS North Yorkshire to help make sure we are ready to get the maximum benefit from information technology. They have considered not just how we could make more use of technology, but how it might support changes in the way we work, learn and live. This involves thinking carefully about fundamental objectives: what are we really trying to achieve? And will it be easier to achieve if we make intelligent use of IT?

Take e-commerce, for example. It would be unrealistic to expect that all businesses in North Yorkshire could - or would want to - climb on the dot.com bandwagon. But it takes only a little lateral thinking to realise that these self-same businesses may be under threat from competitors elsewhere in the country (if not the world) who are preparing to sell to customers in North Yorkshire over the Internet.

The question then becomes, "How do local businesses make sure they keep their customers?" And unsurprisingly, part of the answer concerns the use of IT. If businesses kept better notes of their customers' likes and dislikes, they could give them a more personal service. It's a lot easier to do this using a computer to store and analyse the information.

Those of us involved in CoMPRIS North Yorkshire believe that the challenges and opportunities facing us over the next five years are greater than most people realise. This is why we make no excuse for turning CoMPRIS into a campaign aimed at bringing everyone up to speed, and at getting more and more people and businesses to make imaginative use of IT.

If you feel you can contribute, why not enter the 'Innovative Use Of New Technology' prize in the Evening Press Business Awards, sponsored by CoMPRIS. Or, for more information, please phone Mike Short on 01904 691939. Or (of course!) you can email him on:

m.short@nyorks-tec.co.uk