SCOPE

Modern enterprises face a strong pressure to increase agility and competitiveness, to operate on the global market, and to engage in manifold alliances. However, the vast majority of strategic initiatives in enterprises fail, meaning that enterprises are unable to gain success from their strategy. The key reason for these 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 organization sciences, and as implemented in MBA programs. Such knowledge is indeed necessary for managing an enterprise, but it is inadequate for bringing about changes in a fully systematic and integrated way. To do that, one needs to take a constructional, ontological or engineering perspective.

In addition, both organizations 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. These responsibilities can only be borne if members have an appropriate knowledge and an effective awareness of the construction of the enterprise given by a sound ontological and/or engineering approach.

The notion of Enterprise Ontology adopted in this special session is the systemic notion. Next to the common notion of conceptual schema of a reference universe of discourse (the data view), it comprises the construction view, the process view, and the operation view on organizations. Enterprise Ontology seeks for understanding the implementation abstracted conceptualization of an organization. By nature, an organization’s ontological model is a reference model for all organizations in the same business. Such ontological models are crucial in mastering the complexity of enterprise transformations, and in designing enterprise information systems and enterprise-wide knowledge management systems.

This special session welcomes R&D work that applies concepts of the disciplines of Enterprise Ontology and/or Enterprise Engineering in understanding organizations and subsequently help analyzing, (re)designing, (re)engineering it them and keeping them operational.

It is the mission of the discipline of Enterprise Engineering to develop new, appropriate theories, models, methods and other artifacts for the analysis, design, implementation, and governance of enterprises by combining (relevant parts of) management and organization science, information systems science, and computer science. The ambition is to address traditional topics in said disciplines from the Enterprise Engineering Paradigm (check: the Enterprise Engineering Manifesto in: http://ciaonetwork.org/ciaopublications). The result of the efforts should be theoretically rigorous and practically relevant.

Topics of interest to this special session include, but are not limited to:
• Business Process Management
• Business Process Modeling and Simulation
• Business Rules
• Business Rules Management
• Collaborative, Participative, and Interactive Modeling
• Component-Based System Development
• Ontologies for specific Enterprise Domains
• Domain Reference Ontologies
• Enterprise Architecture
• Enterprise Governance
• Enterprise Modeling and Simulation
• Enterprise Ontology
• Information System Architectures
• Information System Ontologies
• Information Systems Design
• Information Systems Development
• Modeling (cross-enterprise) Business Processes
• Reference Models for (cross-enterprise) Business Processes

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