I read Gail Nickel-Kailing's article, The State of JDF: What if We Threw a Party and No One Came?, with interest. As CIP4's Chief Marketing Officer, the worldwide industry organization responsible for developing and overseeing interoperability testing of JDF and PPF, my challenge has been to increase the visibility and awareness of not only JDF, but of all of the activities being undertaken by CIP4 to promote computer-based integration of processes within the graphic arts industry. As Gail's article indicates, there is a wide variance across both the vendor and user community in terms of actual implementation. Her article prompted me to share my perspective on what we at CIP4 are doing to bring JDF into the mainstream.

While computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) techniques have been used in the manufacturing industry at large for quite some time, the printing industry has been much slower to adopt automation. This has largely been due to the lack of consistent communication standards in a multi-vendor environment. In other words, a printer's disparate systems from different providers often cannot easily talk with each other as a job is being processed. Unfortunately, we cannot allow lack of communication to hold us back from adoption of automation any longer. Our systems need to talk to each other. We simply can't afford to do things the way they've always been done and still stay competitiveand profitable!

JDF InterOpsA Modern-Day Noah's Ark?