GLOBAL FORUM 2003
Palazzo Taverna – Roma
6/7 novembre 2003.

SESSION 5 : « STRATEGIES AND APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESSES »
Rapporteur : Professor Jean-Pierre CHAMOUX, Université PARIS V – René Descartes.

Chaired by Giogio PRISTER, Director IBM Europe, Middle East & Africa (Public sector), this session included eight presentations covering extensively e-commerce development, network services and public policies related to the growing field of business usage of online services. Broadband diffusion and generalisation of easy access to modern networks was the core topic touched upon by those presentations. Most of the contributors coped with one or several of the following three questions: 
-	As broadband seems ready to be the new eldorado of the telecom world what would this mean for businesses? 
-	Would broadband success require specific methods to take advantage of the increased data flow at the corporate door? 
-	What would the broadband story bring to the human environment of the firm?

1/ Broadband availability for businesses picks up very quickly in Europe. As a consequence, usage and access to a whole set of new services is growing faster than most experts would have forecast. One can thus question whether this movement will continue or not on the longer term. In any case, this segment of telecommunication services may well soon appear to follow a trend similar to the one observed over the late nineties by cellular services in Europe and elsewhere in the world, ie. A steady quick growth superseding in most places the most optimistic expectation of the market! (see in particular communications by Giuseppe TILIA from Telecom Italia & Keith TODD from the Stakeholder Group UK).

2/ The above broadband strong and solvent demand seems to be linked to an unforeseen flow of information and knowledge received by the companies at a quicker pace than ever before. This huge flow of data raises unexpected problems for business in not only handling, storing, digesting this broadband inflow of informations, but also putting the individual data into use. Hence the growing necessity to take advantage of the existing tools available at the corporate and local levels, to master the information flow and convert the data received into a competitive advantage for the firm. (see notably communications by Tom COSH & Estelle CHATARD from the Newcastle city Council, Professors Günter KOCH from the Austrian research center and Michael STANKOWSKI from the G. Washington University).

3/ The upsurge for knowledge management and heavy information handling techniques imply to revisit not only the technical features of data handling & storage, but also some important aspects of human management, according to the views expressed by several speakers in this panel. Relationship with workers, clients, providers, even with competitors may be deeply modified with online broadband servicing. Some of the classical rules of business management may require a profound revision to cope with the distance relationships established over the network. Policywise, this may imply that employees training, trading practices, consumers relations etc. have to be revised significantly in the coming years in order to avoid social unease and to improve working conditions at the firm level (see for instance communications by Vittorio DANIORE from the Italian embassy in the US, Denis ETTIGHOFFER chair of the Eurotechnopolis Institute in France & Giogio PRISTER from IBM EMEA in Rome).
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