[agents] CfP: 7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference - Antwerp - Belgium (EEWC 2017)

[David Aveiro]

**Seventh Enterprise Engineering Working Conference**

May 8-12th 2017, Antwerp, Belgium

Experience the benefits of a Working Conference featuring an integrated
Industry Track and a Doctoral Consortium, in the diamond city of Antwerp,
providing inspiration and conditions for an interesting program with
significant scientific advancement.

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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CBBoFAh1RCg>
(LNBIP).

Selected papers will also be invited to a special issue in the
Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1VPBFEfCwY>
(ODEE) journal from Springer.

This year we have the novelty of special sessions on the domains of
Foundational Ontologies - chaired by Giancarlo Guizzardi and João Paulo
Almeida - and Organisational Design - chaired by Rodrigo Magalhães and
Hans Lekkerkerk. Another novelty to increase interaction is the acceptance
of short papers and a poster session. More info below.

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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1JPBFEfCwY>
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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1NPBFEfCwY>
 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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1BPBFEfCwY>
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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CBRoFAh1RCg>
and the paper: The Discipline of Enterprise Engineering
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0LAxoFAh1RCg>
. 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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0LABoFAh1RCg>
.

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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CBBoFAh1RCg>
) series. Selected papers will also be invited to a special issue in the
Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1VPBFEfCwY>
(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://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB19PBFEfCwY
.

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 be published in the
proceedings with a reduction of the original submission to 8 pages in the
camera ready version. Case reports will be officially be published 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
<http://ciaonetwork.org/phplist/lt.php?id=YU0CB1FPBFEfCwY>
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**

 Abstract submission:
 February 6, 2017
 (not mandatory)

 Paper submission:
 February 22, 2017

 Acceptance notification:
 March 7, 2017

 Camera ready:
 March 19, 2017

 EEWC Conference:
 May 8-12th 2017

**Chairs**

**Advisory Board **

Antonia Albani, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Jan L.G. Dietz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

**Conference co-Chairs**

Jan Verelst, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Henderik A. Proper, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology,
Luxembourg

**Program co-Chairs**

David Aveiro, University of Madeira, Portugal

Robert Pergl, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

**Session Chairs**

**Foundational Ontologies**

Giancarlo Guizzardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

João Paulo Almeida, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil

**Organisational Design**

Rodrigo Magalhães, Kuwait Maastricht Business School, Kuwait

Hans Lekkerkerk, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands

**Doctoral consortium co-Chairs**

Antonia Albani, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Ulrich Frank, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

**Program Committee (to be updated)**

 Bernhard Bauer
 University of Augsburg, Germany

 Carlos Páscoa
 Portuguese Air Force Academy, Portugal

 Christian Huemer
 Vienna University of Technology, Austria

 Duarte Gouveia
 University of Madeira, Portugal

 Eduard Babkin
 Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

 Eric Dubois
 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg

 Henderik A. Proper
 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg

 Florian Matthes
 Technical University Munich, Germany

 Frank Harmsen
 Maastricht University and Ernst & Young Advisory

 Geert Poels
 University of Gent, Belgium

 Gil Regev
 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

 Graham McLeod
 University of Cape Town, South Africa

 Hans Mulder
 University of Antwerp, Belgium

 Jan Hoogervorst
 Sogeti Netherlands, The Netherlands

 Jan Verelst
 University of Antwerp, Belgium

 Jens Gulden
 University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

 João Pombinho
 University of Lisbon, Portugal

 Johann Eder
 University of Klagenfurt, Austria

 Joop de Jong
 Mprise, The Netherlands

 José Tribolet
 INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal

 Junichi Iijima
 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

 Marcello Bax
 Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

 Maurício Almeida
 Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

 Miguel Mira da Silva
 INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal

 Niek Pluijmert
 INQA Quality Consultants, The Netherlands

 Nuno Castela
 Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Portugal

 Olga Oshmarina
 Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

 Paul Johanesson
 Stockholm University, Sweden

 Peter Loos
 University of Saarland, Germany

 Philip Huysmans
 University of Antwerp, Belgium

 Robert Lagerström
 KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

 Rony Flatscher
 Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria

 Sanetake Nagayoshi
 Waseda University, Japan

 Sérgio Guerreiro
 Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal

 Steven van Kervel
 Formetis, The Netherlands

 Stijn Hoppenbrouwers
 HAN University of Applied Sciences

 Sybren de Kinderen
 University of Luxembourg

 Ulrich Frank
 University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

 Ulrik Franke
 Swedish Defense Research Agency, Sweden




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