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"Hong Kong industrialists should begin to prepare for the coming of the era of packaged software," he said.

Commissioned in March last year, the consultancy study aims to foster the growth of the local software industry and to enhance its competitiveness by identifying obstacles to development and the means of overcoming them.

Mr Yeung said the consultants had made 17 recommendations- nine for Phase I study and eight for Phase II study to the Government.

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"Having considered these recommendations carefully, the ITC has accepted most of them and would pursue a number of the proposed initiatives," he said.

"For example, the concept of a Software Business Centre will be examined. We are now looking into the mode of operation and the scale of the centre.

"The 'product manager gap' in productising packaged software is a valid concern and ways in closing this gap are being addressed.

"Consideration will be given to recruiting overseas product managers to Hong Kong for transfer of marketing knowledge and arranging forums to share product management knowledge among local software developers.

"The importance of Cyberspace is recognised and ways are being sought to speed up the learning process in the industry.

"For this purpose, a project is now being formulated to help the local software industry to gain more knowledge in the use of Internet and to develop some useful tools and facilities relating to the use of information networks.

"Software quality should also be promoted and the software industry would need to adopt international quality standards to streamline their development process.

"In this respect, a project on software process improvement is being undertaken by the Hong Kong Productivity Council with funding from the Industry Department to help the local software companies gain more understanding and experience in adoption of quality practices," said Mr Yeung.

He said ITC would submit its views on the consultants' recommendations and its own recommendations to ITDC later this year and would then proceed to follow up these initiatives by exploiting various means of funding, including the Industrial Support Fund.

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