7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference – May 8-12th 2017, Antwerp, Belgium

The 2017 Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC 2017) will be the seventh working conference addressing the emerging field of Enterprise Engineering, having as goal to gather academics and practitioners in order to share innovative research issues and practical experiences, mixing rigour and relevance, and to facilitate profound discussions on the issues put forward in the next sections of this Call for Papers.

The proceedings of the working conference will, as always, be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP).

Selected papers will also be invited to a special issue in the Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering (ODEE) journal from Springer.

Please distribute this Call for Papers among your colleagues, and/or mailing lists you belong to, that may be possibly interested in this conference.

Motivation for enterprise engineering

Modern enterprises face a strong pressure to increase agility and competitiveness, to operate on the global market, and to engage in manifold alliances. However, many strategic initiatives in enterprises fail, meaning that enterprises are unable to gain success from their strategy. One of the identified reasons for such failures is the lack of coherence and consistency among the various components of an enterprise. At the same time, the need to operate as a unified and integrated whole is becoming increasingly important. Currently, these challenges are dominantly addressed from a functional or managerial perspective, as advocated by the management and organisational sciences, and as implemented by traditional programs in business schools. Such knowledge is indeed necessary for managing an enterprise, but it is insufficient for bringing about changes in a fully systematic and integrated way. To do that, one needs to take a constructional or engineering perspective.

In addition, both organisations and software applications are complex systems, prone to entropy. This means that in the course of time, the costs of bringing about similar changes increase in a way that is known as combinatorial explosion. Entropy can be reduced and managed effectively through modular design based on atomic elements.

Lastly, the individual persons in an enterprise, in cooperation, are ultimately responsible for the effective and efficient operation of the enterprise. They are also collectively responsible for the evolution of the enterprise, in order to meet new challenges. We believe these responsibilities can be born in a much more effective way if members have an appropriate knowledge and an effective awareness of the enterprise given by a sound engineering approach put forward by a full-fledged scientific discipline.

The mission of enterprise engineering

The CIAO! Enterprise Engineering Network is a community of academics and practitioners who strive to contribute to the development of the discipline of Enterprise Engineering (EE), and to apply it in practice. The long term aim is to develop a holistic and general systems theory based understanding on how to (re)design and run enterprises effectively.

The ambition is therefore to gather and develop a consistent and coherent set of theories, models and associated methods that: enable enterprises to reflect, in a systematic way, on how to realise improvements; and assist them, in practice, in achieving their aspirations.
In doing so, sound empirical and scientific foundations should underlie all efforts and all organisational aspects that are relevant should be considered, while combining already existing knowledge from the scientific fields of information systems, software engineering, management science, organisational sciences, as well as philosophy, semiotics and sociology, amongst others.

To this end, the network regularly organises events such as the Enterprise Engineering Working Conference and associated Doctoral Consortium to drive the promotion and development of the enterprise engineering body of knowledge.

A history of rigour, relevance and an open perspective

The Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC) series emerged out of the CIAO! workshop and doctoral consortium held from 2008 until 2010, after which they transitioned into the Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC).

The EEWC regularly featured an industrial track. To institutionalise the interaction between the practice of enterprise engineering, and enterprise transformation in general, it was decided that as of 2017 the TEE series on Transformation and Engineering of Enterprises will be fully merged into the EEWC series.

The TEE series of events (including PRET, WEETM, LABEM, and AppEER) provides a practice-driven perspective on enterprise engineering, featuring papers that take real-world cases of enterprise transformations as a starting point.

Merging TEE into the EEWC series aims to enable a tight integration of rigour and relevance.

The origin of the scientific foundations of our present body of knowledge is the CIAO! Paradigm (Communication, Information, Action, Organisation) as expressed in our Enterprise Engineering Manifesto and the paper: The Discipline of Enterprise Engineering. In this paradigm, organisation is considered to emerge in human communication, through the intermediate roles of information and action. Based on the CIAO! Paradigm, several theories have been developed, and still are being proposed. They are published as technical reports.

Considering theories or sets of theories as lenses to see and understand reality we can say that two main lenses have emerged out of the CIAO! network efforts: the Enterprise Ontology theories and the Normalized Systems theory, both with relevant results in practice.

Organisations and their enterprises, being socio-technical systems, are the result of a social dialogue among the social individuals that make up the organisation and the two currently identified lenses are, so we certainly expect, not enough. More lenses are needed and the current ones are open to extensions and/or improvements.

The CIAO! community has always taken the view that (1) rigour and relevance, and (2) a shared understanding (based on a shared “meta ontology”, such as the EE paradigm) is a crucial element in ensuring effective discussions within the community. In adding/extending lenses, new members are expected to underline these qualities as well. In adding/extending lenses, it is expected that the “meta ontology” will evolve/extend based on new, shared, insights.

Special Sessions

Having in mind the spirit put forward in the previous section, the EEWC aims to expand its community and reach out to other communities to find sinergies and cooperate in the development of the EE discipline. To this end, from 2017 onwards the EEWC will include special sessions focused on lenses and/or domains as to inspire and facilitate this cooperation effort. Thus, in the EEWC 2017 we plan the following sessions:

• Enterprise Ontology
• Normalized Systems
• Foundational Ontologies
• Organisational Design
• Other EE topics

There is one single track in the conference and accepted submissions will be assigned to one of the sessions above. A few paragraphs follow describing the domains that we are giving special focus this year: Foundational Ontologies and Organisational Design.

Foundational Ontologies

Foundational Ontology (FO) is a human endeavour to “cut nature at its joints” (Plato), thus enabling deep understanding of the reality. Formulating a FO means identifying the most general notions that can be used to speak and reason about all the domains. This becomes substantial in enterprise engineering, as the domains of interest of enterprises vary vastly. Thus foundational ontologies are one of the corner-stone topics of EEWC.

Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) is a modern FO that builds on philosophical roots of ontologies, cognitive science and mathematics to provide a theoretically well-founded, complete and sound FO. It has been successfully applied in various fields of enterprise engineering and computer science and is of high interest of both researchers and practitioners. The founder of UFO,  Dr. Giancarlo Guizzardi together with Dr. Joao Paulo Almeida organise a FO session at EEWC this year. Papers addressing other FOs are welcome, as well.

Organisational Design

Organisation Design, as a field of human endeavour, has been with us for a long time… Reading Exodus you can find Jethro, father in law of Moses, consulting him on the organisation of the Jewish people. Over the years, the field has gone through a variety of definitions and approaches, but it has always stayed close to the concerns of technology in organisations, firstly through the socio-technical systems movement and later through the so-called “information processing” approach. Within this sub-area of concern, organisational structure design, is an area of expertise dealing with the division of labour and the resulting need for coordination, which involves information processing. A statement many organisation designers will agree with is ‘first organise, then automate’ and the information processing view holds it that the structure must make sure that it has the necessary information processing capacity to make things work.

A Dutch approach named modern sociotechnology or integral organisational renewal (IOR) was developed by Ulbo de Sitter (de Sitter, 1997) in the Netherlands and is little known due to the fact that all his writings were in Dutch. He advocated a design sequence in which the production structure is designed, followed by a regulatory or control structure, to end with the information structure’. Another area of concern, closer to strategic management, emphasises a turn away from the disembodied notions of contingency and structure and recognises that organisational design is fundamentally about people and relationships (Gulati et al, 2012; Fjeldstad et al, 2012). Organisational design is seen as an architecture of collaboration based on actor-oriented architectural schemes, expressed not as configurations of organisational structures but as sets of principles which actors follow when engaging in organisational relationships.

Enterprise Engineering, as a relatively new field of expertise that grew out of the IT-systems design and development world, shares many of these concerns. Whether they are called “information processing”, “organisational structure”, “interactivity modelling”, “actor-to-actor orientation” or “enterprise effectiveness”, all these concerns belong to both EE and OD. Hence, one of our aims in this session of the EEWC is to challenge participants to put forward their views on the following question “what are the limits or the areas of interface between EE and OD?”

Relevant topics

Topics of interest to for the EEWC include, but are not limited to:

• Business Process Management
• Business Process Improvement
• Business Process Modelling and Simulation
• Business Rules
• Business Rules Management
• Collaborative, Participatory, and Interactive Modelling
• Domain Ontologies
• Domain Reference Ontologies
• Enterprise Architecture
• Enterprise Design and Implementation
• Enterprise Transformations
• Enterprise Governance
• Enterprise Modelling and Simulation
• Enterprise Ontology
• Foundational Ontologies
• Information System Architectures
• Information System Ontologies
• Information Systems Design
• Information Systems Development
• Interactivity Modelling
• Modelling (cross-enterprise) Business Processes
• Ontology Implementation
• Organisational Design
• Organisational Structure
• Reference Models
• Regulatory Compliance

Publications and Conference format

The EEWC proceedings will, as always, be published in the Springer LNBIP (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing) series. Selected papers will also be invited to a special issue in the Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering (ODEE) journal from Springer.

We are looking for papers on current or recently finished research initiatives/projects as well as papers from practitioners. Based on our motivating experience of the previous working conferences, the seventh EEWC is planned to be a real working conference, providing ample time for profound discussions following the paper presentations. Therefore, normally 40 minutes slots are planned for each paper.

As a result of the merging of the TEE with the EEWC, we will also accept case reports with a limit of 15 pages. Info on what we intend with case reports is available here: http://www.tee-series.org/case-reports.

To foster community building and more sharing and discussion regarding research in our domains, this year we will also introduce the innovation in the EEWC of accepting some papers as short papers and also have a poster session. Submissions accepted as short papers will also be published in the Springer LNBIP proceedings with a reduction of the original submission to 8 pages in the camera ready version. Poster papers and Case reports will be submitted/presented at the EEWC Forum and submitted for publication on CEUR.

Submission

Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions must conform to Springer’s LNBIP format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Submissions not conforming to the LNBIP format or exceeding 15 pages will be rejected without review. Information about the Springer LNBIP format can be found at Springer LNBIP web page mentioned above.

Three to five keywords characterising the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract.

For the actual submission, please go to our Easychair conference web page and sign-up or sign-in, submit your abstract and upload your paper taking in account the dates specified below.

Important note: since the review process is as double-blind as possible, please make sure that your names and affiliations are not listed in the paper submitted for review.

At the same time, to enable reviewers to verify sources/citations, please always provide full citation details, even to your own papers, but in a neutral/anonymous way,

Important Dates

* however please submit your abstract as soon as possible to facilitate review assignment preparation

Advisory Board

Antonia Albani, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Jan Dietz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Conference Chairs

Jan Verelst, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Henderik A. Proper, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg

Program Chairs

David Aveiro, University of Madeira and Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal
Robert Pergl, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

Session Chairs

Foundation Ontologies

Giancarlo Guizzardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
João Paulo Almeida, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil

Organizational Design

Rodrigo Magalhes, Kuwait Maastricht Business School, Kuwait
Hans Lekkerkerk, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Organizing Chair

Jan Verelst, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Program Committee

Alberto Silva, INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal
Carlos Mendes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Christian Huemer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Duarte Gouveia, University of Madeira, Portugal
Eduard Babkin, Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Fernanda Araujo Baiao, UNIRIO, Brazil
Florian Matthes, Technical University Munich, Germany
Frank Harmsen, Maastricht University and Ernst & Young Advisory, The Netherlands
Frederik Gailly, Ghent University, Belgium
Geert Poels, Ghent University, Belgium
Giancarlo Guizzardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Gil Regev, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Graham McLeod, University of Cape Town and Inspired.org, South Africa
Hans Mulder, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Jan Dietz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Jan Hoogervorst, Sogeti Netherlands, The Netherlands
Jens Gulden, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Joop de Jong, Mprise, The Netherlands
Jose Tribolet, INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal
Joseph Barjis, Institute of Engineering and Management, San Francisco, USA
Julio Nardi, Federal Institute of Espírito Santo, Brazil
Junichi Iijima, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Linda Terlouw, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Luiz Olavo Bonino, VU University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marcela Vegetti, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina
Martin Cloutier, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Martin Op ’T Land, Capgemini, The Netherlands
Mauricio Almeida, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Miguel Mira Da Silva, INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal
Monika Kaczmarek, University Duisburg Essen, Germany
Nelson King Khalifa, University, United Arab Emirates
Niek Pluijmert, INQA Quality Consultants, The Netherlands
Peter Loos, University of Saarland, Germany
Petr Kremen, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Philip Huysmans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Ricardo Falbo, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil
Robert Lagerström, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Robert Pergl, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Robert Winter, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Rodrigo Magalhaes, Kuwait Maastricht Business School, Kuwait
Rony Flatscher, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria
Sérgio Guerreiro, INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal
Sanetake Nagayoshi, Shizuoka University, Japan
Steven van Kervel, Formetis, The Netherlands
Sybren de Kinderen, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Tatiana Poletaeva, Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Ulrik Franke, Swedish Defense Research Agency, Sweden