Foreword

The word manage comes from Latin manus , hand. It literally means handling of people or of business or of political affairs, and also gives us the word command, to give into someone else's hands, as an order.

Recent emphasis on service (and business) management tells us that management has at last come back to its original meaning. The modern communications industry has involved and continues to involve a variety of service and business elements such as conventional telecommunication, the Internet, Cable, content, Electronic Commerce, etc., thus requiring the integration/cooperation of each element from the point of view of service and business management. This will become a big issue because each element has grown within its specific environment and has never thought of the outside world in almost all cases.

Integration does not mean the unification, but the mutual cooperation of component members concerned, where and when necessary, mutually respecting each other's culture. Ideal management will be management-less management , which would be expressed in the sense of the word rhizome , i.e., a state which allows of making links freely and detouring any problem without any direction from anyone.

However, this is an ideal situation. Therefore, technologies and methods to facilitate the integrated management will be necessary for the time being (or indeed forever?), and it is important for suppliers to make those as simple as possible. Remember an advanced technology does not have to be a complex one.

You will find such examples of technology solutions and methods for integrated management in this issue of CiTR's Technical Journal, which I hope will further stimulate the progress towards management-less management.

Mac Yoshida
yoshida@netwk.ntt-at.co.jp

Makoto Yoshida is Executive Manager Network and Systems Operations, Networking Divisions Group, NTT-AT (Advanced Technology) Corporation, currently responsible for the management of computing network/systems integration and operations services. He holds a B.E. in electronics engineering and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo.

Before entering NTT-AT, Dr Yoshida worked for NTT with considerable experience in the research and developmental fields of teletraffic engineering, network architecture/design, operations and management architecture/systems, including the international standardisation arena (CCITT). He has also been involved in the activities of NMF (Network Management Forum) since 1988 and is currently Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

He is a member of IEEE, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) and the Information Processing Society of Japan. Dr Yoshida has been serving as a committee member to international symposiums such as NOMS, DSOM, APNOMS and IM (formerly ISINM).