About the Conference

There is a more and more common understanding, that not the ownership of IT resources but their management is the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage . According to Ross et al., smart companies define how they (will) do business (using an operating model) and design the processes and infrastructure critical to their current and future operations (using an enterprise architecture).

The management of information technology resources should be done with the application of engineering principles, called enterprise engineering. Enterprise Engineering allows deriving the Enterprise Architecture from the enterprise goals and strategy and aligning it with the enterprise resources, but it may also be supported by the Enterprise Architecture if the latter is documented. Enterprise architecture aims (i) to understand the interactions and all kind of articulations between business and information technology, (ii) to define how to align business components and IT components, as well as business strategy and IT strategy, and more particularly (iii) to develop and support a common understanding and sharing of those purposes of interest. Enterprise architecture is used to map the enterprise goal and strategy to the enterprise’s resources (actors, assets, IT supports) and to take into account the evolution of this mapping. It also provides documentation on the assignment of enterprise resources to the enterprise goals and strategy. To this end, advantageous patterns (best practices) can be reused and alternative design solutions can be compared. Furthermore, enterprise architecture may be checked for compliance with laws, regulatory rules etc. Finally, enterprise architecture facilitates the measurement the performance and efficiency of the resources used.

There are different paradigms for creating enterprise architecture. The most important regarding the purpose of this workshop is to encapsulate the functionalities provided by IT resources as services. By this means, it is possible to clearly describe the contributions of IT resources both in terms of functionality and quality and to define a service-oriented enterprise architecture. Service-oriented enterprise architecture easily integrates wide-spread technological approaches such as SOA or emerging ones as the cloud computing because they also use service as structuring paradigm. Service-oriented enterprise engineering further develops the enterprise engineering approach selecting service as governing paradigm. The enterprise goals and strategies are mapped to a service-oriented enterprise architecture.

Service-oriented enterprise architecture differentiates four layers of services. Thus, its scope is much broader than the scope of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and also includes services not accessible through software such as business and infrastructure services. Services of different layers may be interconnected in service (value) nets to provide higher level services. 1. Business services are services, which directly support business processes. Business processes can also be developed dynamically (on-the-fly) using business services which are available in a repository for a given business domain. An example is call-centre services provided by an external service provider. 2. Software services exist as two types: (i) human-oriented applications, which are provided as Software as a Service, (ii) application services which are part of so-called Service-Oriented-Architectures that are a popular paradigm for creating enterprise software . 3. Platform Services provide support of the development of applications. They provide services for the execution of applications, middleware stacks, web servers etc. 4. Infrastructure services are more hardware-flavoured services, which are provided using computers. They may have a human addressee but contain many infrastructure services such as providing computing power, storage etc. They are an important topic in management and practice collections such as ITILV3 or standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 have gained a high popularity.

GOALS

The goal of the workshop is to develop concepts and methods to assist the engineering and the management of service-oriented enterprise architectures and the software systems supporting them. Especially three themes of research shall be pursued: 1. Alignment of the enterprise goals and strategies with the service-oriented enterprise architecture 2. Design of the service-oriented enterprise architecture 3. Mapping of service-oriented enterprise architecture to enterprise resources

Conference Dates