Tsurayuki Kado – författare

The short history of the International Working Conference on Educating Professionals for Network Centric Organizations is a good illustration of the tremendous rate of development of global networking, its impact and of its deep penetration into management of business, industty and administration. In 1996, when the theme and name of the conference had been set, there was yet no heavy use of networks in the fields just mentioned. However, it has been already established well enough to enable those with a visionary sense to feel that it will be an important subject and it could be an interesting theme for a conference to be held within two years. It seemed a risky decision at the time but it turned out to be very successful when conducted in 1998. It has been stated that "it took until 1997 for the business world to discover the Internet". In less than two years, the Internet and the Intranets are a vital component for running major parts of the business world. This fast pace puts some pressure on writing papers and holding a conferenc- effort has to be made to have meaningful contents despite the changes. A time span of 9 months between writing a paper and having it published, seemed once to be very short, but it is not so any more when referring to a dynamic issue like global networking.

This work examines the changes in IT education which are imposed by the proliferation of networked applications within commercial organisations. Topics covered include: review of the state of the art in network-centric, multimedia IT applications; positive and negative impact of network-centric, multimedia IT on business and professional educational activities; security and rights management of computer-based information systems; ethics of network uses; the applications of the Internet and Intranet in business, industry, public administration, professional education and training; cooperation between the educational system and industry; providing competencies for professional education stakeholders to cope with drastic changes in IT; and measurement and analysis of IT education and training. It contains the proceedings of the International Conference on Educating Professionals for Network-Centric Organisations sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in August 1998 in Saitama, Japan.