The European Information Technology Observatory (EITO)50 is a broad and unique European initiative which has the objective of providing an extensive overview of the European market for information and communications technology and to render services to this industry, to users and to public authorities. The EITO publishes a yearbook which presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date data including the entire information and communications technology market in Europe. The EITO is strongly supported by the Directorate General III Industry of the European Commission, and since 1995 by the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry of the OECD in Paris. The EITO has been produced with the support of the EITO sponsors, the trade fair SYSTEMS in Munich, European Telework Development (ETD), and the EITO company sponsors Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia.
A press conference was held on 5 March 1998 to launch EITO’98. This latest edition of the Yearbook contains 400 pages of statistics and information, analysing ICT Markets in Europe, including Eastern Europe. For the first time in 1998 a special study on telework, its status, development and issues, was included, prepared in collaboration with the ETD project51. The EITO press conference was webcast (see Annex 4) over the Internet. This was achieved through cooperation between the ETD project and the TWEURO project of the Telematics Applications Programme52.
The third European Telework and Tele-activities Festival was held in Serre-Chevalier (France) on April 2-4, 1998 and attracted more than 200 professional visitors and speakers from several European countries.
Over the last few years this event has become the most important on this topic in France, and because of the large involvement of non-French speakers it has now become a major event at the European level for telework and tele-activities. The wide variety of actors attending all recognise that it is important and valuable to have the opportunity to meet physically in a friendly resort like Serre-Chevalier. The opportunity to meet in such a place where open discussion is possible with researchers, industrialists, politicians, students and real teleworkers has also becomes a platform for launching new projects. This is important because the Serre-Chevalier event is much more than just a conference with good quality speakers and interesting round-table discussions with high level experts from industry and the political world. The ease of communication amongst all these actors, involved in the creation of the Information Society, has made the event unique, one which its organisers (Systemia and the local authorities) are keen to promote.
The two and a half days of the conference consisted of 15 topics built around the telework concept, virtual organisations, telework and SMEs, telework and local development, and distance learning. These ranged from very practical illustrations by activists to more theoretical and conceptual presentations by consultants and university professors. Very practical aspects were raised during the four round-tables where industrialists and politicians responded to probing questions and showed their determination to drive France into the Information Society. For example, the development of a Telework Charter for civil servants was announced by the French Minister of State Modernisation, and was reinforced by support from representatives of DG V and DG XIII of the European Commission.
Technology for the telework segment, and more generally for the implementation of the Information Society, was exhibited by the major sponsors of the Festival, in some cases not yet on the market. These included applications from France Telecom, Matra Grolier Network, Sun, Cisco, etc. Online internet coverage was organised by a start-up company, 35 Mai Production, in alliance with AOL. This was achieved from a car equipped with PCs and satellite communications. Traditional press representatives were also part of the Festival. The French Telework Association have placed close to real time summaries of the event on their website with some live interviews53.
Building upon a very successful event in 1996, a European Telework Information Day was held in Brussels on 28 May 1998. The day provided an opportunity to be updated on the European Commission's policy, information and stimulation activities with regard to telework and to preview this European Telework Status Report 1998. It marked also the official public launch of Telework Week 1998, at which ambitious plans were revealed for an even bigger and more comprehensive programme than the record-setting 1997 Telework Week (see section 5.3 below).
A very wide range of people having a constructive interest in European telework participated in the Information Day. These included Commission staff involved in telework-related activities, regional activists, European and national project participants with activities related to telework, telework national event co-ordinators from previous years, and other key actors including suppliers working at European level and relevant officials of national administrations.
The first part of the day’s proceedings consisted of an update on telework and related activities in Europe in mid 1998. This consisted of an introduction to telework and the Commission’s support, now and in the future; a contribution from the Information Society Forum to the employment debate; a report on the social dialogue on telework within the European policy context; an update on the Fifth Framework Programme; and some headlines from the forthcoming European Telework Status Report 1998. The main message was the need to take Information Society developments into account when planning for the future. This message was not only extended to individuals and businesses, but also to the Employment Policy makers all over Europe, by Mr. Joan Majo, on behalf of the Information Society Forum, in his presentation of the "Newark Declaration". This Declaration contains a contribution to the Employment Debate at European level.
The rest of the day focused explicitly on European Telework Week (ETW). This commenced with presentations of three of the winners of the 1997 European Telework Awards, followed by a Call for Nominations for the 1998 Telework Award, and a summary of overall results from ETW97. Focussing on ETW98, full briefing and information was given as to how to get involved, including a call for award nominations, an explanation of the ETW rationale, a review of support mechanisms, and an Invitation for Initiatives. Finally, an introduction was given to the forthcoming Fifth European Assembly on Telework and New Ways of Working to be held in Lisbon on 23-25 September 1998 (see section 5.3 below).
One of the unique and noteworthy aspects of the Telework Information Day was that it was the first European level telework event to be webcast (see Annex 4). This was achieved through cooperation between the ACTS Programme’s ETD project and the TWEURO project of the Telematics Applications Programme54.
This new conference, held in Berlin 0n 9-10 June 1998, was unique in that it brought together for the first time three complementary strands - Teleworking and Collaboration, Electronic Commerce and Electronic Markets, and Knowledge Management. Supporting strands were on telecentres, virtual organisations and the wider context of key issues for society, economy and business55.
The opening keynote Work and Trade in a Changing World by Maarten Botterman from the European Commission (DG XIII) described the challenge for Europe as "developing a society that Europeans want, whilst staying in the game in an ever more global economy". He stressed the need for continual updating of skills in order to remain employable and that skill shortage was an important factor in limiting growth in micro-enterprises (companies of less than 10 employees) that had created twice as more new jobs in the period 1993-7 as did large enterprises. He concluded with an outline and status update of the Fifth Framework Programme (see section 5.2 below).
Other talks in the plenary session set the scene for the parallel sessions. David Skyrme outlined the growing importance of knowledge as a component of corporate strategy; Scott Welch described factors that help create successful electronic communities, using conferencing software; Sharad Gandhi outlined key technological components for building an e-business; Horace Mitchell stressed the need for active participation in online collaboration to gain the necessary skills, exhorting that Europe needs to "move at a faster pace".
Four sessions in this stream provided a useful mix of research results and case studies. The various sessions indicated the growing sophistication of teleworking. Michael Sonntag, for example, described intelligent agents as ‘inevitable tools’ for teleworkers in that they could help automate their email, personalise World Wide Web resources, seek out information and carry out transactions online. In the organisational dimension, Paul Jackson outline the growing benefits of virtual organisations in closing the ‘innovation gap’ and spelt out the issues faced by SMEs and others in making them work. In a separate session on virtual organisations, the various speakers showed how the virtual approach could expand markets and opportunities for their participants. Recurring themes were the need for effective coordination, trust and clarity on contractual matters such as intellectual property rights.
Four separate sessions covered a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from connecting legacy systems to the Internet and the logistics chain, from virtual call centres to online banking. The plethora of topics and viewpoints was aptly illustrated by the comments of Armin Lange who said that "there is not a single best suited approach to electronic commerce that can be universally applied as some popular publications might suggest". Commonly cited benefits were reduced time scales e.g. time from order to delivery, information exchange e.g. better customer information, and lower costs e.g. through customer self service. The biggest change was that of the customer relationship. More pro-active approaches actively engage the customer in dialogue and use technology to match their preferences to the products and services available. Jack Mark reminded the audience that whatever the technology used, it must "deliver solutions to ordinary people"; therefore, he added, "low key but functional applications" were preferable to "impressive technical solutions".
A new theme at this conference, as at many others, was provided by two sessions on knowledge management. These were a mix of technological biased presentations and user experiences. One of the technologies that is making its mark is ‘push’ technology i.e. the provision of information via Internet ‘channels’, pushed to the user, either as alerts or in background mode while they are working on other things. Another is intelligent agents, already mentioned in the teleworking context, but for the knowledge worker they discern concepts rather than using simple keyword searches. The case studies were of organisations who had adopted a structured approach to knowledge management, in one case through mapping key areas in a way that easily lent itself to multilingual use, and another through use of knowledge related performance indicators for a virtual company. Even more so than the electronic commerce theme, this topic seems so new that coherent themes have yet to emerge, with each talk representing a quite distinctive aspect of knowledge management.
During the closing plenary and review, and just as the audience thought that things were progressing well in Europe, along came Dr Andrew Crilly of the Open Enterprise, Singapore to deliver the closing address Asia: Millions Click into Gear. Using multimedia and video coverage he portrayed vividly how two contrasting Far Eastern countries, Singapore and Bangladesh were determined not to be left behind in the race towards the Information Society. Crilley gave four reasons why Asia could leapfrog Europe in what he calls the next wave: "heralding the Information Society and a new age of reason, one that will be based on knowledge that grows from information":
This was a stimulating final paper to an interesting conference. In his concluding remarks, conference chairman Dick Davies noted that discussion of many of the topics at the conference had moved "beyond the technology", and related to the skills, organisational, social and policy context. He welcomed the new streams and looked forward to greater interaction between the various strands and even more case studies at the next conference.
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