This book grew out of the belief that, although the potential of CIM is widely recognised, there is little understanding and great nervousness concerning the practical matter of its implementation. Are you confident that your company will find the right answers to these questions: * In which areas can CIM most significantly influence the competitive position of your company? * What information is it essential to include within a CIM plan? * How can each phase of your CIM plan be cost justified, and how should it be audited for success? * How should you set priorities for implementing the various phases of a CIM plan? * What is the significance of networking to CIM? Every company investing in CIM faces these questions but too frequently they are left unanswered. Our experience is that the implementation of CIM is primarily a management challenge not a technical one. The greatest challenge is how to make the organisational changes needed to obtain the benefits from CIM. This book is a valuable guide to anyone planning to invest in CIM.

Speech technology - the use of speech as a means of sending information to, and receiving information from computer systems has been in use as a research tool for many years. Only recently has it begun to move out of the laboratory and into commercially worthwhile applications, first with compressed and synthesised spoken messages, then with computer recognition of spoken messages, and today with diverse applications involving both recognition and reproduction of human speech. We have written this book because we believe the technology has now advanced to the point where many more applications of voice recognition and response are both feasible and economically attractive. Computers that can understand everyday speech are still a distant prospect, but provided the limitations of present day equipment are clearly understood there is much that can be achieved with it. Our aim is to show, in non-technical language, what is now possible with the help of speech technology. The text includes many examples of current applications in industry, commerce and other fields, and we have selected five current industrial applications combining speech recognition and response for more detailed attention. Industrial cases have been chosen both because we see industry as an important growth area for speech applications in the next few years, and because it presents some of the greatest difficulties in speech recognition - if you can make it work in industry, then you can make it work almost anywhere."