Dr. Matsushita is currently a professor of the Division of Information Engineering, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi-shi, Japan. He had been working at NTT's Laboratories until the end of March 1997. He was engaged in the R&D of digital network. He has spent most of the last ten years in the R&D of Network Operation and Management. He was active in international as well as in domestic standards arena. He was a vice-chairman of ITU-T SG 4 from 1989 to 1996. He was in the TMN Experts Group of ITU-T for more than ten years. He was also active at the technical team of NM forum. He received the B.E., M.E. and D.E. degrees from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1968, 1970 and 1995, respectively. He is a member of IEEE, and IEICE of Japan.

Roberto Saracco graduated in Computer Science and has a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. He was involved in Software Design for the first Italian SPC systems in the 70's. He actively participated in standardization activities at CCITT in the 80's in the area of Formal Description Techniques. Since the mid-80's he led research activities in Telecommunications Management in CSELT. He has been directly or indirectly participating in a number of international standardization organizations including CCITT, OSI, ETSI and T1M1. He chaired the group at EU level for planning European research activities in the area of software technologies and the EURESCOM group designing the framework for European co-operation on TMN. He has led the EURESCOM group on Information modeling for Pan European Services and Network Management. He's a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal on Network and Systems Management, and an active member of IEEE where he chaired the Committee on Network Operation & Management in 1994-1996. He is now Chair of the Committee on Enterprise Networking. Since 1994 he is head of the Marketing & Communications area in CSELT.

Keith Willetts has over twenty-five years of experience in the telecommunications and computing fields. He is a founder and President of the NMF as well as a Senior Vice President with TCSI, a leading provider of object-oriented software products. Prior to joining TCSI, he held a number of operational, development, marketing, product management and strategic business development positions at British Telecom. He was responsible for the market development of BT's International Carrier Services and was the driving force behind a number of BT's managed services and the advanced capabilities of the Concert Service View program. He has had wide international experience and is recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on network and service management. He is a regular writer and presenter on global networking, network/service management and has just co-authored a book on the subject - The Lean Communications Provider. His pioneering work on management frameworks and technology has led to a cluster of prestigious awards and adoption of his ideas within leading international standards. He has been honored twice in the Communications Week "Top25" awards for visionaries in the US communications industry and led the team that was awarded the British Computer Society medal for innovation in 1993 for Concert Service View. He lives in England and is married with three children.