ECOM Journal 2008
Contents > Contribution > For the Future Development of the Next Generation Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the member companies of the Next Generation Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan (ECOM) and other concerned parties for their continued support for, and cooperation in the policies of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Three years have already passed since the start of ECOM's activities, and twelve years have passed since the foundation of the original ECOM. During these twelve years, ECOM has worked for the full-scale dissemination of RFID tags and electronic commerce, playing a leading role in the introduction of information technology in Japan. As a result, Japan has become one of the world's top broadband powers, and electronic commerce has been adopted all across the country.
I believe we are now in a new phase in which we are transforming our strength in information technology into the strength of industry and society as a whole, and in close coordination with ECOM, it is time to enhance efforts in the following three areas.
The first area is the use of information technology to strengthen industrial competitiveness. The use of information technology, such as information systems and EDI, greatly contributes to productivity improvement in companies in terms of cooperation across organizational walls during development and production. However, because the specifications of information networks between companies, such as EDI, vary by each corporate group or industry, the networks do not necessarily provide a mechanism for a wide spectrum of related companies to cooperate with each other. In order to strengthen the industrial competitiveness of Japan, therefore, we need to advance the standardization and dissemination of information networks between companies, such as EDI, and develop an environment to promote cooperation across corporate and national borders.
The second area is the use of information technology to address such social needs as environment, safety and security. In order to efficiently address environmental issues, such as the management of chemical substances, environment and recycling, and safety and security issues, such as product safety and food safety, it is imperative that we have a mechanism to provide information to consumers while allowing concerned parties to share necessary information. Therefore, we need to enhance the functions of EDI, which has been mainly used to manage production and sales such as receipt and placement of orders, and build new information networks and databases that can address such social needs as environment, safety and security.
The third area is the use of information technology to provide new added values to consumers. Computerization of automobiles opens up new possibilities for the Japanese manufacturing industry through cooperation between the automobile industry and the electric and electronics industry to provide consumers throughout the world with new products and services previously unheard of. In order to provide this kind of new added values to consumers, we need an environment where different kinds of cross-industrial cooperation can be formed one after another, and we also need to make information networks and databases a shared infrastructure utilized by the concerned parties from wide-ranging industries.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will continue to promote these three efforts together with ECOM. We have strong expectations that ECOM will lead the industrial world through these activities.