Dr Robert Wellington
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
rwelling@aut.ac.nz

As a first time guest editor I fortunately found that the task was quite enjoyable. There was an element of personal endeavour and energy in all of the papers I reviewed, although readability issues did occasionally get in the way of meaning. Having gone through the process as an author I could sympathise with the odd grammatical oversight, and in my experience it takes at least ten times longer to proof a document than it does to write it in the first place.

Individually the papers that are published in this edition have something to add to our knowledge about applying Information Technology in our society. The first three papers are by researchers setting an agenda for their research. These help to ascertain the importance of a research track and perhaps will also help other researchers refine their own course of study. The first paper concentrates on the dynamics of Information Systems in the Airline industry, insights into pricing and multi-country / multi-company dynamics leads to a rich picture for the potential of studying a multitude of Information Technologies at an industry infrastructure level, both existing and new. The second paper is about the implementation of Customer Relationship Management software, a contemporary topic that pivots on the analysis of high failure rates: in terms of issues this is "new meets old". The third paper is then more forward looking: mobile computing in healthcare. There has already been significant development in the filed, the bulk of this issue may be forthcoming and is set out as a rich area for future research.

The next cohesive part of this edition is about Information Technology (IT) in education. The papers in this section can each be described as some reflection on professional practice. The first and the last are about the development of courses: the focus of each can be deciphered from the respective titles. While the first paper specifically attempts to apply some principles of adult education, the "middle" one in this group is an intensive analysis of a single case of a young dyslexic learner, and the role that IT had in this case, in particular.

The last section contains a report on the maturity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in higher education in South Africa (SA). Although this may not be of immediate interest to the reading community of New Zealand (NZ), this paper is an intermediary report on a comparison of ICT developments in SA and in NZ. We include this paper on its own merits: first, BACIT is Web-based and our reading community could be international; secondly - to allow the authors to set out an episode of the comparison so that the concluding report can focus less on background and more on the findings of the comparison.

The Bulletin is still in its early days and matchingly, most of the papers in this issue are at the beginning of a cycle of research. The ones reporting on primary research can easily be conceived as ongoing projects. Hopefully, as BACIT matures, the content will progress, and we may very well have some of the same authors submitting again in the next couple of years, reporting on the results from their ongoing research. Or maybe it will be the readers who will either begin a research project or will find something useful to say to the rest of us about applying Computing and Information Technology.