The beginning of 1999 saw the arrival of a new management team at ITU, elected by the Union’s Member States at the Minneapolis Plenipotentiary Conference in October 1998.

Yoshio Utsumi took the helm as ITU Secretary-General, following a long and distinguished career with Japan’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. New Deputy Secretary-General Roberto Blois was formerly the Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL), and also held senior posts with Brazil’s Ministry of Communications.

They were joined by the Directors of each of the three ITU Bureaux – Robert Jones, who was elected to a second term after a successful four years as Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau (BR), Houlin Zhao, who was elected to the post of Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) after many years’ experience coordinating ITU standardization work, and Hamadoun Touré, who left a senior private sector position in the field of satellite communications to take up his new role as Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT).

The new team, which was elected on a platform of ITU reform, has demonstrated a strong commitment to this goal through a range of formal and informal initiatives aimed at redefining the future role of the Union in relation to the needs of its growing and evolving membership. At the same time, they have ushered in widespread adoption of new procedures such as cost recovery mechanisms, while actively developing new strategies to increase the organization’s responsiveness by eliminating inefficiencies at an operational level.

Through these and other initiatives, the new team hopes to foster the creation of a new ITU, which will continue to play a unique and vital role in the evolution of the infocommunications sector in the 21st century.