The 20th century is the era of mass media based upon the innovation of printing technology. We are now entering the new stage where all text and graphics are digitally coded and transmitted through data communication networks. The printing technology developed from the typesetting mechanisms such as Linotype invented 100 years ago to the color scanners that appeared after the World War II and converted any information into electronic signals. The computerized phototypesetting machines that appeared in the 1960s converted letters into the digital information to process them. The digitization process was accelerated in the 1980s and the half of the1990s until it became possible to process all text and graphics as digital data in the whole system from input to output. After each technological innovation took place, any expensive machine such as total scanner would be soon downsized.

Today, a personal computer can process any information, any text and graphics, in digital. The Internet that was originally born in a UNIX world has been explosively used with the diffusion of personal computers since 1995. With the increasing harmonization of computer technologies and the decreasing costs for computers, more and more printing businesses are using data communication networks to carry out all their works, for example, to receive original data from customers and transmit the proofed pages by means of PDFs. It is said that a prohibitive cost is required to use a data communication network in order to transmit a tremendous amount of data required to high precision print. However, the use of data communication networks will be as more popular as that of telephone and facsimile systems, as the costs for using such networks are lower.

Thus, the spreads of electronic digital-coded information and data communication networks are irreversible phenomena as if the means of transport shifted from coaches to automobiles. The world will go toward a new horizon that we have never seen. The existing printing business model will be obsolete as if coaches as means of transport disappeared. In the Just-in-Time or &KANBAN & system adopted by TOYOTA, suppliers delivered an order of parts in time to the company according to its operation schedule of production lines. The network version of this system, &Supply Chain Management &, has started to operate. In the new system, the vender and the buyer can make transactions through a data communication network in real time, and no intermediate person is required. This system can largely reduce the time of production process as well as the costs for products.

In the other words, the challenge of networking is not to rationalize the existing work or determine the profit and loss, but prepare for providing appropriate services in the coming age of networking. It is no exaggeration to say that it will be useless to provide services such as on-demand printing, CTP and FA/CIM or make equipment investments without the base of data communication networks.

The utilization of data communication networks for the printing business may be significantly different from the conventional know-how of printing management. Inthe conventional printing companies, their funding abilities were important to introduce new technologies. In the information service sector, the most important is the engineer's abilities such as proposing improvements in customers' task processing procedures and designing the systems necessary to realize these improvement proposals.

Conventionally, printing companies have competed with each other for introducing new equipment by resorting to their funding abilities, because it was highly appreciated and had an advertising effect to introduce better equipment and obtain the good performance of operation ahead of competitors. Today, however, the introduction of new equipment is more risky because the equipment is more rapidly obsolete. The advertising sign with a statement &We have hundreds of Macintosh computers & was effective in the past. Today, however, the introduction of the up-to-date computers has no advertising effect. It is rather important to operate new equipment effectively than to introduce it in a hurry.

Any excellent computer will be out of date in 2 years. It is generally more efficient to update less expensive computers in a proper timing. In the past, it had a higher advertising effect to install more computers. In the age of networking, however, operators can jointly work by using a decentralized computer network. Therefore, greater importance is attached to the abilities to plan how to work by using the information received or transmitted on a data communication network, to distribute loads and to control the information and network than to increase computers and operators.

Apart from their main activities, fortunately, there are many opportunities of business for printing companies to build up a new profit-gaining structure by providing new services through data communication networks. In the past, however, printing companies could not take these opportunities of business well, because there was a large gap between the new services and the conventional printing business. For instance, the companies that print direct mails, but do not seal envelopes, print addresses on them and forward them cannot provide maintenance services for address databases. To provide services derived from the printing business, it is also necessary to learn the know-how and knowledge different from those required for the printing business.

Even if individual customers install and use DTPs, they may still pass their orders to printing companies, because they cannot have so many employees as to carry out the peak amount of work. In this case, printing companies may secure orders from potential customers if they have a managing ability similar to that of talent dispatchers. They have long made efforts to take up orders for graphic designs. However, their efforts will not bear the fruits of business if they do not have any ability of presentation enough to satisfy their customers, whether their graphic works are good or bad. This is true if they propose system configurations to customers. On-demand printing services are not profitable for printing companies, though they present the merits of small lot and low cost to customers. Therefore, it is necessary to change the conventional contract procedure of individual ordering into the other such as outsourcing.

The know-how related to the intellectual property is essential to provide services based upon contents such as image database. This is the main reason why it is difficult to produce multimedia works. In a project such as the production of multimedia works, the supervisor just like a film director has to make coordination between various specialists in order to implement the project effectively. Therefore, whether or not the project will be successful as a profitable business depends on the project management.

Some printing companies have shifted their business from text processing to information processing services. To provide the latter, it is not sufficient that the persons in charge are capable of programming and using the specific languages that they learned in the past. They must use various languages depending on different ages and applications. Some printing companies tried to enter the upstream and downstream sectors, but did not always succeed, mainly because they did not have sufficient knowledge required in these sectors. To date, printing companies had to learn an empirical knowledge in their business. In the future, they must collect a new information unknown among their customers to make proposals useful for them. For example, designers working in general construction companies have not probably mixed concrete materials or welded metallic members, but have a good knowledge necessary to determine what techniques should be used to satisfy the customers' needs. A printing company must steadily accumulate and control a larger amount of non-empirical knowledge in any discipline than its competitors in order to be able to use it as its own arms. Or otherwise, any &derivative & activity will not become the second main business for the printing company.

In U.S.A, private-sector enterprises have been urgently information-oriented, because they realized that they might win against their competitors only if they made strategic and tactic decisions more rapidly and accurately. To win against their competitors, they vied with each other in computerizing the data and knowledge management and understanding the conventional data and new knowledge as soon as possible. This means that an enterprise must predict the future ahead of the others to become a leader in the industry. In the highly information-oriented society, a competition pattern is settled that companies make a more careful information management and take actions more promptly than the others. As a result, attention is directed to the methods such as EC. Convenience stores that sell daily commodities, but not special goods have attained a high growth, because they developed the optimal distribution system meeting the consumers' needs, but did not intend to increase their sales by relying on the quality of goods. The courier services, similar to the conventional carriage business, also have largely developed in recent years, because they speeded up the carriage to meet customers' needs, but did not severely follow their fixed schedules. To diversify printing and other services, printing companies also must accomplish their self-reform under the sophisticated information/knowledge management system. As one of the means, the knowledge management system of American network type can be now easily established anywhere. Today, it seems that the challenge for the printing industry has already been shifting from the digitization of producing systems to the creation of such an organization that can make a knowledge management by using intranets or extra-nets, including the internal information sharing or communication system.