The UK IT Association (UKITA) has a long track record of cooperation with the public sector and funded projects
UKITA was founded in 2002 by one of the 9 English Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Originally the West Midlands IT Association (WMita), it was funded over 5 years by Advantage West Midlands (AWM) and transitioned into a self-sufficient entity in 2007. At members’ request, we renamed the Association to reflect the newly UK-wide geography and UKITA was born.
UKITA welcomes enquiries from Public Sector bodies and Higher Education in connection with collaboration on design and/or delivery of funded projects and input to bids. We are also interested to hear about all EU funded and other funded projects around promoting the uptake and optimisation of ICT amongst SMEs anywhere in the UK and Europe
Please see our page on our Regional IT Hub portals which are available for use free of charge by appropriate public sector and educational organisations in order to create their own digital ecosystems and drive visibility of funded ICT and SME projects in their regions - Click Here To View Portals Page
Public Sector and European Milestones
2002 - Founded and funded by AWM - the RDA for the West Midlands
2007 - Founder member of the European Digital SME Alliance - the pan-European organisation for ICT SMEs. Its members comprise national Associations of ICT SMEs in EU states whose combined membership is over 20,000 and has its permanent HQ and Secretary General in Brussels where is engages with the EU institutions at all levels - (the organisation was founded as PIN SME and was renamed in 2016( www.digitalsme.eu
2007-2008 - UKITA selected as the delivery partner for the EU-funded e-Adoption project whereby UKITA members were funded to provide consultancy and services which helped client companies to transition to higher-value usage of IT
2010-2012 - Delivered the UK dissemination part of a project around RFID adoption and ROI - Funded by the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme - http://www.rfid-sme.eu
2012-2104 - UKITA was the UK Leadership Panel member on the European Commission funded CREATE project introducing advanced ICT to SMEs in 5 cooperating regions of North West Europe. The project was UK-led with Herefordshire Council as the lead partner. Other Leadership Panel members included Microsoft and IBM. The project ran for two years and its legacy lives on in the UK through the Faster Business project funded and run by Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Councils. The leadership panel role involved travelling to working sessions in each of the 5 European partner regions. UKITA also provided advisor members for the UK advice sessions and designed and delivered several innovative aspect of the project toolkit www.create-nwe.eu and subsequent project www.fastershire.com
Summer 2014 - Hosted the UK dissemination event for a European funded project in the area of Cloud adoption by SMEs
2014 - UKITA members were accredited to give funded advice under the BIS-funded Growth Vouchers scheme. Strict criteria for selected sector-specific professional ‘gateway’ organisations included that their members operated under a professional code of conduct with an active complaints policing policy. Other ‘gateways’ included the BCS (formerly the British Computer Society) , the accounting professional institutes ICAEW and ACCA, Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).