Program overview

Our Enterprise Engineering Working Conference starts on Monday, dedicated to our Doctoral Consortium. On Tuesday we have the conference’s paper sessions starting, continued on Wednesday and Thursday.

The Doctoral Consortium will take place in Pavilhão de Informática II of Instituto Superior Técnico while the rest of the conference will take place in the congress center of IST. You can find the map locations and addressees here.  

The Doctoral Consortium dinner will take place in  Restaurant Sem Dúvida at 20h, the map location can be found here.

Being our conference a “Working” one, we have ample time for the presentation and discussion of each paper and several slots dedicated to general discussions.

The Keynote lectures take place one a day starting on Tuesday till Thursday ending with the Emeritus Keynote, José Tribolet.

The list of accepted papers and posters (including titles, authors and abstracts) to be presented is available after the table below containing the program overview.

Doctoral Consortium Sessions – titles and authors

(Abstracts of these sessions are available below)

• DC Session 1 – The Enterprise Operating System and its role in the governance, viability and sustainability of enterprises
  by António Fernandes (Supervisor: José Tribolet)
• DC Session 2 – How Enterprise Engineering Methodology support organizational transformation with Capability Maturity Framework
   by Shoji Konno (Supervisor: Junichi Iijima)

Accepted Papers – titles and authors

(Abstracts of these papers are available below)

Topic: Processes

• Paper  1 – LegalLanguage: a Legal Domain-Specific Language and its Application in Legislative Production Processes
  by Ambrósio Soares, Paula Ventura Martins and Alberto Silva
• Paper  2 – Generation of stakeholder-specific BPMN models
  by Diogo Cardoso and Pedro Sousa
• Paper  3 – Business Processes Compliance In Partially Observable Environments
  by Isabel Esperança, Pedro Sousa and Sérgio Guerreiro

Topic: DEMO

• Paper  4 – Design evaluation of an extension to the DEMO meta-model
  by Mark Mulder

Topic: Blockchain

• Paper  5 – Model-driven Liaison of Enterprise Engineering Methodologies and Blockchain Platforms
  by Eduard Babkin and Nataliya Komleva

Topic: Models and Enterprise Architecture

• Paper  6 – Analysing Strategic Alignment Problems – using Inter-domain Matches of Enterprise Architecture Models
  by Dóra Őri and Zoltán Szabó
• Paper  7 – Enterprise Architecture as a Public Goods Dilemma: An Experimental Approach
  by Jannis Beese, Kazem Haki, Stephan Aier and Robert Winter
• Paper  8 – Engineering the black-box meta model of data exploration
  by Robert Winter and Li Yang

Topic: Blockchain

• Paper  9 – A Visual Domain Specific Language for Modeling Blockchain Smart Contracts
  by Marek Skotnica and Robert Pergl

Topic: DEMO

• Paper  10 – DEMO Action Model and eNgine bridGing OntOlogy anD implementation (DAMN-GOOD) approach
  by Magno Andrade, David Aveiro and Duarte Pinto

Topic: Models and Enterprise Architecture

• Paper  11 – Maturity Assessment of TOGAF ADM using Enterprise Architecture Model Analysis and Description Logics
  by Diogo Proença and José Borbinha

Forum – Posters – titles and authors

(Abstracts of these posters are available below)

• Poster  1 – ADA: Embracing technology change acceleration
  by Ondrej Dvorak, Robert Pergl and Petr Kroha
• Poster 2 – The role of Enterprise Architecture Management to Govern Microservice Architecture adoption
  by Carlos Roberto Pinheiro, Sérgio Luís Guerreiro and André Vasconcelos
• Poster 3 – Cause-and-Effect Analysis in the Organizational Engineering Processes of the G.O.D. Organization
  by Dulce Pacheco and David Aveiro

Forum – Invited Talks – titles and abstracts

• INCM Integrated Management System
  Author: Ricardo Vieira – Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda (INCM)
  Abstract: The Integrated Management System (IMS) of Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda (INCM) is a process-oriented approach to manage the organisation. The IMS is responsible for monitoring the efficiency and effectiveness of the implemented business processes, assuring that risks are evaluated and mitigated, and that processes comply with legal, contractual and regulatory requirements applicable to INCM. In this presentation we present how the IMS is applied and integrated with the daily activities of the organisation.

• Mine your Business! The process is not the practice, you know?
  Author: Joaquim Nogueira – Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD)
  Abstract: “There’s a lot missing in this process that you’ve documented. I do a lot more than that!” “No, we have more than 50 processes in our department. That list can’t be right!” These are some of the most common reactions we get every time we start documenting new processes or revising existing ones. No one cares about them and sometimes people don’t know they even exist. But as soon as we start talking about them … Ah! Ah! Everyone knows that’s not it.
  Perhaps we end up talking about representation, notation, design, documentation and all sorts of things we can do to explain and understand the “Process.” It’s inevitable! But today I’d rather focus on what we can do with and to the Process and let you with a challenging question: What if we could draw it just once, for the sake of planning, and never had to look at it again?

• Managing multi-view business processes models
  Author: Pedro Sousa – LINK Consulting
  Abstract: Despite the multiple shortcomings of BPMN notation for business process modeling, it continues to be widely used in the industry. One of the difficulties is the production of models that are suitable for different stakeholders, each with specific concerns, leading to models that may not be equally suitable for all stakeholders. Far from being a final solution, the simple fact that we define a set of dimensions to characterize the activities, making them something more objective than a simple name, allows us to deal with the problem of generating on-the-fly BPMN models specific to each stakeholder.

Forum – Papers – titles and abstracts

• Blockchain As A Tool For Effective Value Co-Creation Strategy Realization: An Application to An Insurance Case
  Authors: Pavel Malyzhenkov, Eduard Babkin and Karina Pakhomova
  Abstract: Value co-creation is a new notion in contemporary business practice, which is now also becoming one of the key marketing concepts. The success of the value co-creation strategy is based on the DART (dialogue, access, risk-benefits and transparency) concept which is emerging as the basis for interaction between the consumer and the firm. Distributed ledger technologies like blockchain leverage DART realization allow the business to avoid intermediaries and make innovative business models economically feasible. The insurance sector represents a very good example here. Thus, the purpose of the present paper is to describe a case realizing the reengineering the business model of an insurance company towards actual implementation of the value co-creation strategy in a case of blockchain usage. 

• Leveraging Blockchain to Improve Clinical Decision Support Systems
  Authors: Vidya Soundararajan, Bonnie McDaniel, Jiyo Shin, Sweta Sneha and Vijayaraghavan Soundararajan
  Abstract: Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) fail to reduce medical errors because they are unable to interact actively with various sections of the electronic health records (EHR) and provide context-appropriate alerts. The ineffectiveness of the CDSS increases the cognitive burden to clinicians, worsens alert fatigue, and increases the duplication of tests and health care costs without improving patient outcomes. The architectural framework that leverages the CDSS with a blockchain platform that robustly interacts with the electronic health record (EHRs) and consequently reduces physician burnout, eliminates irrelevant alerts, reduces healthcare costs and improves patient outcomes. We perform a literature review of over 2400 articles that describe CDSS, EHRs, blockchain technology and identify the shortcomings of the current CDSS and propose changes to the CDSS that utilize blockchain technology. We create an architectural framework of a CDSS leveraged with blockchain technology that interacts well with clinical workflow, reduces the cognitive burden to the clinician, eliminates irrelevant alerts and duplicate tests and improves patient outcomes. Therefore, leveraging blockchain technology with the CDSS provides a CDSS that interacts with EHRs and reduces the cognitive burden to the clinician, provides context relevant alerts and eliminates the duplication of tests. These attributes can reduce physician burnout, reduce healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes.

Doctoral Consortium Sessions – titles and abstracts

• DC Session 1 – The Enterprise Operating System and its role in the governance, viability and sustainability of enterprises
  Authors: António Fernandes (Supervisor: José Tribolet)
  Abstract: There is a lack of artifacts to handle the enterprise self, and consequently with its dynamic self-governing system, responsible for continuously assuring its viability and sustainability, in a fast changing environment. We need constructs to better model enterprises as self-observing systems, and not merely as observed systems. We introduce the concept of Enterprise Operating System (EOS), as the emerging enterprise´s control and governing system, which turns enterprises into autonomous, intelligent, viable and sustainable entities. Our assumption is that all organizations, being complex social-technical systems, evolve to higher complex levels, whereby at some point “organizational autonomous life” emerges as a reification, at a macro systemic level, of the social-technical network of its autonomous agents or its network nodes. This reification is precisely realized by the emergence of the EOS, which turns the enterprise into a kind of autopoietic system, with logical closure, characterized by its self-reference, identity assertion, and the emergence of its consciousness. The EOS should be able to compile in near real time its position and trajectory (integrating its functional, ontological and evolutionary views), to assess if is in line with its viable and sustainable states set and trigger/call for correction actions whenever needed. Our research goal is to develop a universal EOS (UEOS) model and a methodology, to design, diagnose and improve the EOS of any organization, sup-ported by sound theory, grounded in Enterprise Engineering knowledge, General System Theory, Viable Systems Theory and other relevant complexity theories.

• DC Session 2 – How Enterprise Engineering Methodology support organizational transformation with Capability Maturity Framework
  Authors: Shoji Konno (Supervisor: Junichi Iijima)
  Abstract: In response to changes in the environment surrounding an enterprise, many occasional To-Be models like IT Governance models and IT service management models have been proposed. Recently, digital enterprise model has attracted attention. The concepts, frameworks, and methodologies dealing with the enter-prise have also changed in response to the movement. While we are leading enterprises to the transformation to the To-Be model from various perspectives, and it is difficult to promote transformations that maintain interoperability across them, while viewing the enterprise from various perspectives. It seems that we are working on the closed framework of individual frameworks and methodologies that deal with the same enterprise. The goal of this paper is to define commonly available dimensions related to the enterprise and apply a mechanism for analyzing the influence of the change based on those dimensions collaborate with the concept of enterprise engineering on enterprise transformation.

Accepted Papers – titles and abstracts

• Paper 1 – LegalLanguage: a Legal Domain-Specific Language and its Application in Legislative Production Processes
  Authors: Ambrósio Soares, Paula Ventura Martins and Alberto Silva
  Abstract: Nowadays legal ontologies have greater applicability in legal processes, being poorly explored in the legislative process context. The authors analyse the adoption of legal ontologies as a tool to support the activities of the legislative process, in the period between the submission of bills and their ratification. This article introduces the state of the art on normative and legal ontologies; proposes a legal domain-specific language to be particularly used in parliamentary contexts, and also discusses some application examples. The analysis of the state of the art on normative and legal ontologies allows us to identify some problems, namely concerning the activities involving the elaboration of laws that tend to be very human-intensive and error-prone. Consequently, we propose the LegalLanguage, a language particularly suitable for the definition and specification of law(s) in a more rigorous and systematic way, and that allows to keep track different types of intra and inter-laws relationships (e.g., structural, order or temporal relationships between articles or even between laws). Finally, a case study discussion shows the importance of a language like LegalLanguage in the writing and production of normative documents in the broad context of legislative production processes.

• Paper 2 – Generation of stakeholder-specific BPMN models
  Authors: Diogo Cardoso and Pedro Sousa
  Abstract: A business process model always has a dominant perspective in the detriment of others, motivating the need of different stakeholders to look for different models of the same process. In fact, it is common to see that in different units of an organisation, such as quality, audit, risk or human resources, there are different models of the same processes, each focusing specific aspects. Unfortunately, these models tend to lack consistency because of the effort required to keep them consistent. To tackle this problem, we are developing an approach that aims to generate stakeholder-specific models on the fly, based on some arbitrary stakeholders’ concerns. We derive the generated models from a consolidated business process model, which is previously designed, thus ensuring the consistency between the generated models.

• Paper 3 – Business Processes Compliance In Partially Observable Environments
  Authors: Isabel Esperança, Pedro Sousa and Sérgio Guerreiro
  Abstract: This paper aims to provide an answer: how to obtained compliance through observation and control in instances of business processes modelled on Business Process Management(BPM), in partially observable environment. An organization is a dynamic system where actors play roles and produce results and decisions autonomously, changing the overall state of the system. These decisions often occur in environments that are not fully observable. In order to face with the market demand and legal impositions, organizations need to come up with innovative solutions by optimizing their business transaction models allowing them to assist in decision-making processes. The business process models are intended to represent an organizational reality and restrict the freedom of design to allow common understanding between stakeholders and to define the roles of the actors, who instantiate the state transactions of business process. Organizations need to ensure that operational processes are performed in a controlled way to meet predefined requirements, complying with regulations, laws and agreements established between internal and external stakeholders. This project concerns the beginning of a proposal to master this problem. The solution was implemented in enterprise simulation environment, using Enterprise Cartography(EC). The results obtained demonstrated the ability to observe and control the process instances as a contribution to improving the compliance of Business Process, modelled in BPMN.

• Paper 4 – Design evaluation of an extension to the DEMO meta-model
  Author: Mark Mulder
  Abstract: The Design and Engineering Method for Organisations (DEMO) is the principal methodology in Enterprise Engineering (EE). It assists in making so-called essential models of organisations, which are highly abstracted ontological models. Many essential models have been produced in practice, of very different kinds of organisations, and the expressions of these models in diagrams and tables have been presented to various types of stakeholders. It turns out that the ease to understand the models varies significantly, depend on existing knowledge, background and need of the stakeholders. As a consequence, the acceptance of the essential model by these organisations also varies significantly. In this paper, the results of an analysis of the model and model content of five successive iterations are presented and discussed. This has given rise to proposing an extension to the applied OER method (Organisational Essence Revealing), such that the different kinds and levels of foreknowledge among the stakeholders can be accommodated. An iteration of this extension is also briefly presented.

• Paper 5 – Model-driven Liaison of Enterprise Engineering Methodologies and Blockchain Platforms
  Authors: Eduard Babkin and Nataliya Komleva
  Abstract: In our research we studied the open problem of lacking principles, algorithms and tools for automatic generation of private blockchain-related artifacts based on the process models. ArchiMate modelling approach was selected for producing source platform-independent organizational models. Also a selection of the target blockchain platform has been performed. The objective of that work was producing a set of mapping rules and a corresponding software tool which facilitate automation of mapping between concepts of the ArchiMate enterprise architecture model and the HyperLedger Composer blockchain platform. During test evaluation simplification of the development process was observed.

• Paper 6 – Analysing Strategic Alignment Problems – using Inter-domain Matches of Enterprise Architecture Models
  Authors: Dóra Őri and Zoltán Szabó
  Abstract: The goal of this paper is to discuss and analyse enterprise architecture management (EAM)-based opportunities for supporting strategic alignment, focusing on inter-domain relationships of enterprise architecture models. Recently EAM is a major facilitator of IT-related planning and development efforts. Strategic alignment is a management approach to harmonize organization and technology in several dimensions, and EAM can be a useful tool to facilitate this continuous process. The paper drafts how EAM-based analysis methods can be used to explore misalignment problems. Alignment-related problems and symptoms are categorized and discussed using EAM-based concepts. The paper focuses on inter-domain matching between business, application, data and technology domains, and provides a systematic review of the relevant analysis perspectives and available EAM artefacts appropriate for discovering misalignment symptoms.

• Paper 7 – Enterprise Architecture as a Public Goods Dilemma: An Experimental Approach
  Authors: Jannis Beese, Kazem Haki, Stephan Aier and Robert Winter
  Abstract: Enterprise architecture management (EAM) in organizations often requires coping with conflicts between long-term enterprise-wide goals and short-term goals of local decision-makers. We argue that these goal conflicts are similar to the goal conflicts that occur in public goods dilemmas: people are faced with a choice between an option (a) with a high collective benefit for a group of people and a low individual benefit, and another option (b) with a low collective benefit and a high individual benefit. Building on institutional theory, we hypothesize how different combinations of institutional pressures (coercive, normative, and mimetic) affect decision makers’ behavior in such conflictive situations. We conduct a set of experiments for testing our hypotheses on cooperative behavior in a delayed-reward public goods dilemma. As preliminary results, we find that normative and mimetic pressures enhance cooperative behavior. Coercive pressure, however, may have detrimental effects in settings that normative and mimetic pressures are disregarded. In future work, we plan to transfer the abstract experimental design to the context of EAM and to subsequently test whether the preliminary results also hold in the EAM context.

• Paper 8 – Engineering the black-box meta model of data exploration
  Authors: Robert Winter and Li Yang
  Abstract: With an increasing amount and diversity of available data, data exploration is becoming critical for many businesses to create insights for business innovation. From an analysis and design perspective, however, data exploration is still dominated by IT-related modeling concepts so that it is difficult to align IT-enabled potentials with business demands. Business stakeholders do not think in terms of (even conceptual) data structures, but in terms of intended insights, business questions, decision context, information quality, etc. This study elaborates requirements for conceptualizing data exploration from a business perspective, discusses to what extent existing business-oriented conceptualizations fulfill such requirements, and consolidates promising modeling concepts into a meta model proposal that links purpose, context, domain knowledge, exploration history, business question, available data, user, decision, business insight, presentation and non-user stakeholder as key concepts. The meta model is demonstrated by instantiating it to conceptualize five exemplary data exploration use cases. Furthermore, first evaluative insights are presented.

• Paper 9 – A Visual Domain Specific Language for Modeling Blockchain Smart Contracts
  Authors: Marek Skotnica and Robert Pergl
  Abstract: A Blockchain (BC) is a technology that introduces a decentralized, replicated, autonomous, and secure databases. A smart contract (SC) is a transaction embedded in the blockchain that contains executable code and its internal storage, offering immutable execution and record keeping. The SC has enormous potential in automating traditional paper contracts and encoding contract logic into program code. Thus, replacing the role of a notary and a central authority. It may dramatically reduce an effort with administration workload and enforcement of such contracts. 
  In this paper, we propose a new visual domain specific language that can capture the SC in a user-friendly way and eliminate the errors associated with programming since the SC code is automatically generated from models. 
  Finally, an open-source proof-of-concept environment for designing and generating the SC is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility of proposed concepts.

• Paper 10 – DEMO Action Model and eNgine bridGing OntOlogy anD implementation (DAMN-GOOD) approach
  Authors: Magno Andrade, David Aveiro and Duarte Pinto
  Abstract: We consider current Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) Action Rules Specification to be: 1) ambiguous, while using a “structured english” syntax similar to the one used in SBVR but with no formal ground; 2) incomplete in a way that does not contain enough ontological information to derive an implementation; and 3) complex by containing mostly unneeded specifications of three types of assessment. We propose a new meta-model for DEMO’s Action Model in the form of a BNF syntax which is being implemented in a prototype that directly executes DEMO models as an Information and Workflow System. This prototype includes an action engine that runs DEMO transactions and the enclosed actions specified in our DAMN-GOOD approach. We are currently integrating Blockly in our solution to allow syntactically correct visual programming of our proposed new Action Rule language that includes constructs to evaluate logical conditions, update the state of internal or external information systems, obtain input and provide output (formatted with WYSIWYG template editor) to users, among others.

• Paper 11 – Maturity Assessment of TOGAF ADM using Enterprise Architecture Model Analysis and Description Logics
  Authors: Diogo Proença and José Borbinha
  Abstract: A Maturity Model represents a path towards an increasingly organized and systematic way of doing business. It is therefore a widely used technique valuable to assess certain aspects of organizations, as for example business processes. A maturity assessment can enable stakeholders to clearly identify strengths and improvement points, and prioritize actions in order to reach higher maturity levels. Doing maturity assessments can range from simple self-assessment questionnaires to full-blown assessment methods, such as those recommended by the ISO/IEC TS 33030 or the SEI SCAMPI. A main caveat of these assessments is the resources they encompass. In addition, many times the lack of automation renders benchmarks not possible. Assuming that the wide spread of Enterprise Architecture practices is making the modeling of business domains a fact, and considering the recent state of the art on the representation of those models as ontologies, this paper proposes how existing semantic technology can be used to automate TOGAF ADM maturity assessment of real organizations by automating the analysis of enterprise architecture models in ArchiMate.

Accepted Posters – titles and abstracts

• Poster  1 – ADA: Embracing technology change acceleration
  Authors: Ondrej Dvorak, Robert Pergl and Petr Kroha
  Abstract: The pace of technology change has accelerated in the past decade. Conceptually similar technologies are introduced on nearly a daily basis. On one hand, IT experts call for applying the most modern approaches and technologies to software projects, on the other, companies suffer from liabilities to a technology used in their legacy solutions. This seems to result in a disturbing situation when a specific technology of an ongoing software project becomes legacy almost before the project successfully hits a production. This poses a continual challenge for software development, and effective ways of technology transition are sought. Affordance-Driven Assembling (ADA) represents such an effort from the standpoint of enterprise engineering theories. In this paper, we formulate a high-level architecture of a software system based on ADA. We demonstrate the architecture on a detailed example of an object-oriented system. We evaluate the qualities of such architecture from the perspective of evolvability using Normalized Systems Theory, and we formulate conclusions on potential of this approach.

• Poster  2 – The role of Enterprise Architecture Management to Govern Microservice Architecture adoption
  Authors: Carlos Roberto Pinheiro, Sérgio Luís Guerreiro and André Vasconcelos
  Abstract: Microservice Architecture (MSA) is an architectural style that aims to build a software application as a set of small services independently deployable. When adopting MSA, companies must drive some aspects that impact the organizational efficiency in order to guarantee (i) the strategic benefits of the initiative; (ii) promote the best resources usage and (iii) separate the essential decisions to EA and postpone the other aspects to the microservice teams’ decisions. This paper assesses the relevant factors about MSA from the enterprise architecture management (EAM) perspective, in order to propose an ArchiMate metamodel architecture which could be used as a template for other companies’ enterprise architecture (EA). The resulting model supports two different approaches, one top-down and another bottom-up, which complement each other in the function of planning and keeping up-to-date the EA models. In the end, (i) a model defining principles and governance guidelines, (ii) a generic team structure and (iii) an architectural reference for technology standards which enable the enterprise governance of MSA, are engineered

• Poster  3 – Cause-and-Effect Analysis in the Organizational Engineering Processes of the G.O.D. Organization
  Authors: Dulce Pacheco and David Aveiro
  Abstract: Nowadays, enterprises are an intricate web of people, processes, rules, IT, responsibilities, tasks, and more. This complexity frequently originates in-efficiencies that commonly turn into the loss of valuable resources and might even compromise organizations’ viability. Organizational change is a recurrent necessity, as it allows enterprises to be continuously adapted to new environments, technologies, and requirements. Enterprises have reported to struggle and often fail when implementing the needed organizational change processes. The Control and G.O.D. (Generation, Operationalization & Discontinuation) (sub)organizations allow enterprises to define measures and viability norms that help to identify and acknowledge exceptions. Dysfunctions are controlled and eliminated through resilience strategies or organizational engineering processes. Organizational engineering processes within the G.O.D. organization often reveal to fail to eliminate or circumvent the cause of the exception. We argue that this model will benefit from the incorporation of a method to the investigation of the root causes. Based in the seven guidelines for Information System Research in the de-sign-science paradigm, we argue that the organizational engineering process should be complemented with a more systematic and broader investigation of causes, namely by using the Ishikawa approach of cause-and-effect analysis. The main contribution of this paper is in the improvement of the organizational engineering process for handling unexpected exceptions in re-active change dynamics, namely in the detection of the root causes of the unexpected exceptions. Therefore, it should contribute to the reduction of recurrent dysfunctions and to an easier implementation of a dynamic and “living model” of the organization.

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