Forthcoming Keynote Lectures

Keynote: Modeling and Simulation of Organizations and Business Processes with DPMN

November 9th, 2020

by Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Abstract:

Organizations are complex social systems with many actors performing various activities in multiple business processes.
At a basic level, organizations are Discrete Dynamic Systems consisting of objects and events, connected via causal regularities.
As such, they can be described with an Object Event Modeling (OEM) approach, using UML Class Diagrams for state structure modeling and the Discrete Event Process Modeling Notation (DPMN) for process modeling. In particular, their business processes can be modeled in the form of a DPMN Process Diagram defining a set of event rules capturing causal regularities. The resulting model defines a set of object types, event types, and event rules, which form an Abstract State Machine providing the execution semantics of OEM and DPMN. Like Petri Nets, OEM/DPMN have a formal semantics. But while Petrie Nets are an abstract formalism without an ontological semantics, OEM/DPMN are based on the ontological categories of objects, events and causal regularities.
We argue that OEM/DPMN form a good basis for exploring the semantics of higher-level organizational concepts, such as norms and goals.

Brief Bio:

Gerd Wagner is Professor of Internet Technology at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany. After studying Mathematics, Philosophy and Informatics in Heidelberg, San Francisco and Berlin, he (1) investigated the semantics of negation in knowledge representation formalisms, (2) developed concepts and techniques for agent-oriented modeling and simulation, (3) participated in the development of a foundational ontology for conceptual modeling, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), and (4) created a new Discrete Event Simulation paradigm, Object Event Modeling and Simulation (OEM&S), and a new process modeling language, the Discrete Event Process Modeling Notation (DPMN). Much of his recent work on OEM&S and DPMN is available from sim4edu.com and dpmn.info.

Keynote: Radical Digitalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Enterprise Modeling

November 9th, 2020

by Kurt Sandkuhl, The University of Rostock, Germany

Abstract:

Auftrgg: Prof. Kurt Sandkuhl / Fabienne Lambusch (IEF; WIN; Universität Rostock)

Digitalization and digital transformation have been an important topic for a lot industries and application domains during the last years. In many enterprises, the result is a long list of digitalization projects – some of them completed, many still ongoing – and doubts about long-term benefits. Where are the disruptive effects of digital transformation?

Radical digitalization is  a way of (re-)focusing on innovation opportunities with strategic and long-term effects for an enterprise. In practice, this requires definition of problems and goals, changes in business model, design of new processes and services – and much more that can be supported by enterprise modeling. The resulting challenges and opportunities for enterprise modeling are analyzed in the talk. The perspective taken is the practice of enterprise modeling rather than new theoretical approaches.

Brief Bio:

Kurt Sandkuhl is a Professor of Business Information Systems at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Rostock (Germany), and affiliated Professor of Information Engineering at Jönköping University (Sweden). Kurt Sandkuhl’s research areas include the fields of enterprise modeling, knowledge engineering and digital transformation. He published 5 books and more than 200 peer-reviewed research papers. Recent research projects have been addressing digital transformation in small and medium-sized enterprises, methods for capability management, and enterprise architectures for regulative compliance in financial industries.

Past Keynote Lectures

Keynote: Framing Enterprise Engineering within General System’s Theory: Perspectives of a Human Centered Future

September 28th, 2020 – 10:30 CET

by José Tribolet, IST / INESC and Transformer Lda, Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract:

Organizations, namely Enterprises, are socio-technical entities that co-exist with us Humans in our physical world and possess material and virtual individuality.

The purpose of this keynote talk is to claim that by fully imbedding System´s Theory at the core of Enterprise Engineering we potentiate the means of provide dynamic steering mechanisms to drive the behavior of each enterprise while respecting the freedom of the human actors and preserving essential ethical principles that must obeyed by any engineering activity.

After reviewing the conceptual basis and making explicit the material basis of any organization and of its actions and behaviors I will address the thematic of Enterprise Steering and Dynamic Control, both from the systemic / holistic, as well as operational / processual points of view.

Then I will use the BoK of General System´s Theory to apply the fundamental engineering principles of Dynamic System´s Control namely using Kalman´s State Space Control Paradigm, to represent and understand how to design real time systemic control mechanisms in an Enterprise.

In particular emphasis is given to the need to provide the sufficient sensorization of an Enterprise, capable of assuring the adequate level of observability to achieve the desired level of controllability capable of ensuring the intended level of operational risk level in real time.

In my view Enterprise Engineering, “latu sensu”, addresses all the phases of an Enterprise Life Cycle, from Conception, Design and Construction, to Operations, Control, Adaptation and Maintenance, all of these stages including obviously the multiple dimensions of Management.

The BoK of Enterprise Engineering is essential to assure that Humanity will retain the ultimate control on the technologic tools we use and incorporate in the Enterprise Self, namely the machines, in particular the “silicon actors” progressively equipped with powerful AI and Autonomous Learning capabilities and in the near future other type of technological actors with attributes that are several orders of magnitude more powerful that individual humans and even the entire Humanity.

The challenge to combine the “innovative” Ontological Foundations of Enterprise Engineering with the “hard” capabilities to design and steer complex systems as provided by System´s Theory and Dynamic Systems Control is before us. If we do not “engineer# our Enterprises to be ultimately always leaded and controlled by Humans, we will, with all probability, be massively controlled by machines in a not so distant future.

Brief Bio:

José Tribolet is Distinguished Full Professor of Information Systems (Retired), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, Portugal and President of INESC – Intituo de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, He is Researcher Emeritus at the Information and Decision Support Systems Group at INESC-ID Lisboa. 

His main academic interests are in Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Engineering, Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Transformation, Since 2000 he has completed with success the supervision of nine Ph.D. students in Enterprise Engineering. 

Dr. Tribolet holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1977). He was a member of the research staff of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, from 1977 through 1979. He spent a full sabbatical year (1997-98) at MIT´s Sloan School of Management. He was a guest professor at IWI – the Institute for Information Management of the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, during the spring term of 2012.

He founded in 1980 the first non-state owned research institute in Portugal, INESC – Institute for Systems and ComputerEngineering. INESC is today a holding of six research institutes nationwide, three of them having become formal Associated Laboratories of the Portuguese Science System. Dr. Tribolet is the President of INESC. He has been Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (4 years, 1984-1987) and Chairman (6 years, 2002-2003, 2013-2016) and Vice-President for Post-Graduate Studies of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of IST. He is a founding member of the Portuguese Engineering Academy and a founder of the Informatics Engineering College of the Portuguese Engineers Professional Association.

Dr. Tribolet has been playing an active international role in the development of the new area of Enterprise Engineering: he founded and co-chaired the track on “Organizational Engineering” at ACM´s SAC Conferences from 2004 through 2009; he founded and co-chaired the new track on Enterprise Engineering, at the 2007 European Information Systems Conference. He has created, the new track on Enterprise Engineering, at HICSS Conference, starting in 2010. He plays a leading role in the CIAO! Consortium. He was the General Chairmen of the 2013 IEEE Conference on Business Informatics He his co-editor of the Springer Enterprise Engineering book series. He was until December 2016 an associate editor of BISE – the Business and Information Systems Engineering Journal. He has been General Chairman of the EEWC Conference in 2014 (Funchal, Portugal) and in 2019 (Lisbon, Portugal). 

Dr. Tribolet provides executive counseling on Enterprise Architecture, Engineering, Governance and Transformation, through Transformer, Lda, a professional services company that  advises top executives on matters involving Enterprise Information Systems, Architecture, Engineering, Governance, Strategy, Alignment, Transformation and Knowledge Management aspects. 

He works or has worked with companies such as Portugal Telecom, Portucel, Soporcel, Águas de Portugal, Moviflor, Jerónimo Martins, Grupo Sá, and Aviludo and several Departments of the Portuguese Public Administration, in particular, the Attorney General´s Office (PGR) and the Ministry of Justice (IGFEJ),  InIR, INCI, IMPIC, INCM and local municipalities, such as Câmara Municipal de Sintra and Empresa Municipal Cascais Ambiente. 

He was actively engaged in GPERRTIC, a 6 year national strategic program to rationalize and improve the Information Systems and IT infrastructures of the Portuguese public administration, where he served as a member of its Advisory Board.

Keynote: A Linguistic Perspective on Fact Based Modelling and DEMO

October 19th, 2020

by Stijn Hoppenbrouwers, HAN University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands

Abstract:

Both Fact Based Modelling and DEMO originate in a school of thought linking a highly focused, functionalist use natural language with more strictly rational structuring rooted in logic. Where FBM (a family of information/data modelling techniques including ORM, FCO-IM and of course the DEMO Fact Model) has a clear, operational link with terms and phrases in natural language, DEMO has mostly maintained the language and communication connection through underlying principles and theories. Given that the fields of Enterprise Architecture and Engineering, as well as good old Information Systems Design & Engineering, inherently concern aspects of language and communication, it is interesting to have a look at further ways in which a linguistic perspective might contribute to DEMO practice and theory.

Brief Bio:

Dr. (1970) is Professor of Data & Knowledge Engineering at HAN University of Applied Science, Arnhem, and Assistant Professor at the Data Science dept. of Radboud University, Nijmegen (the Netherlands). He has a background in theoretical and applied linguistics (MA, Utrecht, 1993; MA, Bangor, Wales, 1994), which since 1996 he has put to work in context of Information Systems and Conceptual Modelling, starting as a Researcher at Tilburg University and joining the Language Action Perspective community. After two years in Industry (Ordina) he landed at Radboud University (Nijmegen) where he joined Erik Proper in setting up and running the Information Systems curriculum. In 2003, he defended his PhD thesis called ‘Freezing Language: Conceptualisation Processes across ICT-Supported Organisations’ (with Erik as promotor). He was also part of the team that conceived the ArchiMate modeling language. Since then, his research and teaching have covered topics like collaborative modelling, communication about systems, requirements engineering, gamification of modelling, knowledge elicitation, continuous model based development, and controlled natural languages. In 2012, he was appointed professor of applied sciences at HAN UAS, but he tenaciously keeps one foot in at Radboud. He is now involved in setting up a Master’s curriculum in Applied Data Science at HAN UAS.

Keynote: Human-Centred Design as the Way Forward for OD & EE

October 19th, 2020

by Rodrigo Magalhães, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores (INESC), Portugal

Abstract:

Although Organization Design (OD) and Enterprise Engineering (EE) are topics from quite different academic origins their integration seems to be a practical and ontological necessity. Over the years I have had the privilege of contributing towards several attempts at integrating the two topics. While OD deals with the organization as a whole, EE is focused on the modelling of processes that are abstracted from parts of the organization. Each nucleus of such process can be called “an enterprise”. Trying to integrate these two worlds is indeed a problem, however, the issue is exacerbated by the fact that OD, as many other topics in organization studies, means different things to different people. The contingency approach still dominates much of thinking in academic management circles, but there are many other more “popular” interpretations of OD, which only contribute towards the current theoretical confusions around the concept. Against this background, I have dedicated the best part of the last 15 years of my research time trying to make sense of this field, having come to the conclusion that none of the existing approaches provided a satisfactory answer to the scope and complexity of the problem. The design discipline then emerged as the best foundation for an entirely new approach – Human-Centred Organization Design (HCOD) – which has been developed into book, soon to be published by Oxford University Press.

In this presentation, I offer a summary of the main ideas contained in the book and touch very briefly on some of the most significant approaches to EE. Moreover, I suggest that whatever the approach, EE research is always about developing the best way to abstract and model processes which exist in real-life organizations. On the other hand, organizations are always social entities and no matter the level of abstraction or the methodology used, intervention in real-life organizations should always be aimed at contributing towards achieving organizations that are humanely managed, commercially viable, sustainably developed, highly innovative and firmly stakeholder-aligned. These are the aims of HCOD.

In conclusion, I posit that while integration between OD and EE as part of the modelling exercise is not a feasible proposition, HCOD can play an important role in providing an integrated contextual (i.e. organizational) background in which EE researchers can/should situate, conceptualize, develop and test their abstracted process models. Also, I suggest that the key principle of HCD – design as meaning – can provide an important semantic foundation for EE modelling methodologies.

Brief Bio:

Rodrigo Magalhaes is Professor of Management, currently affiliated as a researcher to INESC, Lisbon, Portugal. He was formerly Dean at the Kuwait-Maastricht Business School in Kuwait, and a faculty member at the School of Management and Economics at the Catholic University of Portugal. He also held a visiting position at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. Prof Magalhaes has an extensive publishing record in the areas of design management, information systems management, organizational change, knowledge management, organization learning, business process management and e-learning. His current research interests are focussed on human-centred organization design and its implications for organizational transformation and change.