Educating tomorrow's managers for telecommunications and EDI: a cross-cultural experience.

Telecommunications addresses the tyranny of distance for international and domestic trade communities by providing information linkages both internally and externally to an organization. These global networks give firms the opportunity to gain strategic advantages such as the strengthening of trading partner relationships and the redesigning of internal procedures to improve overall efficiency and cost effectiveness. The business community, however, has been slow to adopt telecommunications and its enabled technologies – electronic data interchange (EDI) in particular – owing to a general lack of understanding of the benefits available from their effective utilization. Describes an education‐oriented approach designed to encourage greater acceptance of telecommunications and EDI by educating university students – the managers of the future – about applied telecommunications in an international environment. Discusses also the cultural and cross‐cultural experiences of the students who participated in this pilot project. The results indicate that there is evidence to support the hypothesis that EDI is an appropriate exemplar technology for teaching applied telecommunications in an international environment; and that a laboratory‐based strategy is an effective way of using EDI to achieve this objective and providing students with experience of the cultural and cross‐cultural factors involved in international commerce.