Ray O. Waddoups

Information systems frontiers

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM January 2000/Vol. 43, No. 1 71 In this article, we focus on certain important and promising IS/IT frontiers identified from the perspectives of academia, industry, and federal research funding agencies. Our objective is to focus the collective awareness of the IS community and those in related disciplines on some of the frontier developments in IS/IT with a vision of the road ahead and point to challenges and opportunities [1]. We address the following emerging frontiers in IS/IT: the integrated circuits (IC) revolution, object technologies, knowledge and distributed intelligence, the evolving multiagent intelligent systems, satellite networks and mobile computing and the virtual corporation of the next millennium. These frontiers capture significant areas of research and development with the potential to fundamentally alter the field of IS/IT in the next millennium. Jagdish Chandra, Salvatore T. March,

Keynote Address: Education - The World's Best Investment

In February, 1946, the information age was born as the ENIAC was christened — the worlds first electronic computer. The five decades since then have witnessed the most rapid advancement of capability in history with a million times improvement in the span of a single career. That rate of change proscribes that all workers in the field will be obsolete in only a few years after graduation unless education and training continue as a way of life. Both the employer and employee must take responsibility for skills updates.