Many communities across England took part in the Market Town's Initiative; a programme to help rural towns to take stock, and to develop ideas and consensus on where they would like to be in the future. The result is often an impressive document, providing a detailed and honest audit of the town, a view of the towns direction and goals, together with a list of projects needed to achieve their end goals.

If a market town were an established family business and had just undergone the same soul-searching process, it is likely to reach for the IT department to see how technology might help make the process of change quicker, cheaper or simply more interesting. Market towns rarely have this resource to hand, so GTC has developed a process, involving workshops and interviews, to produce a Technology Plan which does exactly this - it delivers a detailed and creative assessment of technology opportunities linked to the MTI Action Plan.

Communities have found the process of developing the Technology Plan useful even before the report is published; it challenges ideas and priorities, and seeks to identify linkages between apparently disparate facets of the Action Plan, to maximise the return. Not all of the outcomes involve technology - GTC believes technology is only great when its intelligently and sensitively applied to a problem, its not a panacea, so some problems are better solved in other ways.

GTC is happy to talk to parish councils and MTI committees about how we can help turn an Action Plan into a reality.