In conjunction with
7th International IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology 2005
July 19, 2005, Munich, Germany
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~mrs/BT05.htm
Paper submission deadline: February 15th, 2005
Call for Papers
---------------
To succeed in today's highly-competitive and customer-driven
marketplaces businesses have to constantly transform their offerings,
operations, and relationships in the face of competitive
opportunities. In this context, recent research focuses on the
concept of agility. Agility can serve two business goals speed and
resilience. For some businesses agility is mainly about being able to
detect competitive market opportunities and seizing them with speed.
For others agility is mainly about being able to respond quickly to
short-term changes in demand or supply and handle external
disruptions smoothly.
There is a growing awareness that IT infrastructure is essential for
enabling business to achieve agility - independent whether speed or
resilience is the main business goal. One key determinant of this
agility is the ability to adapt IT infrastructure to new requirements
in a swift manner. Agility, however, also needs to be balanced with
often competing goals of efficiency and controllability. To achieve
efficiency, businesses optimize their internal processes as well as
processes that integrate customers and suppliers across the value
chain. Controllability requires businesses to transform their
processes to make them visible, controllable, and provably compliant
to legislation and promised service levels. Currently IT
infrastructure in areas such as ERP, Business Performance Management,
Customer Relationship Management, Knowledge Management, and
Collaboration Management has mainly focused on helping business to
improve single goals (e. g. efficiency and controllability) - with
the implicit hope that improvement towards one goal will not
negatively affect the others (such as agility).
Agility and its relation to other goals such as efficiency and
controllability has been the object of research and practical design
decision making in a number of communities and on different levels of
emergence for quite a while, e.g. in the areas of IT architecture,
software engineering, business process management, or collaboration
support.
The goal of the workshop is to revisit relevant research, examine
practical experiences, and to identify common mechanisms and
principles that show how businesses can improve the agility of IT and
through IT while satisfying the constraints of efficiency and
controllability. We want to explore the feasibility of consolidating
such outcomes into a more general theory of agility, similar to the
idea of coordination theory.
To gain a broad perspective, we see key enablers for IT agility on
two levels. The first is the level of IT systems as such. Adaptation
is enabled, for example, through flexible composition of services,
flexible allocation of resources (grid and virtualization), raising
the level of abstraction in systems design (model-driven
architectures), or increasing the flexibility of work processes
support (workflow systems and collaboration support).
The second level comprises IT activities, e.g. IT development and
operations. Adaptation on this level is related to change and release
management processes (as defined e.g. in ITIL) or in flexible
software engineering approaches (agile methods). Both levels interact
as the technical design of systems and task partitioning are often
closely related, improving or deteriorating overall agility,
efficiency, and controllability.
To provide workshop participants with the necessary data for
discussion and analysis we solicit workshop submission in four
categories:
(1) Lessons Learned: These cases studies or multi-project literature
reviews provide data about one or more business transformation
projects that provide insight into mechanisms or design principles
for improving agility. These submissions should discuss either a case
with focus on optimizing a single dimension (e.g. process efficiency)
had negative effects on other dimensions (e.g. reduced process
adaptivity) or a case where agility was improved while simultaneously
maintaining or improving the other dimensions. Submissions in this
category should provide data that show why these effects occurred and
to what degree these effects were the result of the design of IT
activities or methods used and to what degree the effects were
facilitated (or hindered) by specific features of the employed
computational infrastructure.
(2) Technology Analysis: Submissions in this category present
analysis of technical solutions and features of IT infrastructures
that improve agility. The focus should be on identifying the
underlying mechanisms or design principles of IT systems that foster
agility. Furthermore, the submissions should discuss the implications
for the design of IT activities for systems acquisition and
operations that enables firms to leverage the technical potential for
agility. Submissions should provide detailed argumentation in the
form of realistic business application scenarios and (ideally) real
case studies to substantiate their claims.
(3) Framework Development: Submissions in this category consolidate
findings from one or more relevant research communities on agility
and its trade-offs with efficiency and controllability. The
frameworks should provide guidance for further theory development.
Submissions should provide a literature review, propose an
integrating framework for the findings, and demonstrate the
usefulness of the framework for setting a research agenda or
analyzing empirical findings.
(4) Modeling Proposals: Submissions in this category present
proposals for modeling IT agility or IT options and their link to
business processes. Representing flexibility and variety is still a
key challenge for modeling IT systems and IT-enabled business
processes. Authors should argue how their approach enables firms to
discuss requirements and solutions for improving agility and analyze
trade-offs with efficiency and controllability.
Contributions are invited from following research fields:
- Business Transformation
- IT Architecture and Management
- Business Process Management
- Collaboration & Knowledge Management
- Software Engineering
- IT Service Management
- Service-Oriented Computing
- On Demand Computing
Submissions
-----------
Authors are invited to submit original and significant research
contributions in the aforementioned areas. All submissions will be
peer-reviewed by the members of the international program committee.
It is planned to publish the proceedings in the Springer Lecture
Notes in Computer Science. Full papers must not exceed 16 pages and
conform to the LNCS style. We accept papers in PDF and PS format.
Important Dates
---------------
Paper submission: February 14, 2005
Paper notification: March 31, 2005
Camera-ready papers: April 30, 2005
Workshop Date: July 18-19, 2005
Workshop Chairs
---------------
Markus Stolze,
IBM Research, New York, USA, mrs AT us.ibm.com
Tilo Böhmann,
Technical University Munich, Germany, boehmann AT in.tum.de
Hong Chai,
IBM Research, Bijing, China, caihong AT cn.ibm.com
Program Committee Members (tentative)
-------------------------------------
W. van der Aalst (TU Eindhoven, NL)
M. Amberg (Univ Erlangen, DE)
B. Fitzgerald (Univ Limierick, IRL)
T. Herrmann (Univ Bochum, DE)
G. Katzenstein (Univ Hong Kong)
H. Krcmar (TU Munich, DE)
J. Lerch, (CMU, US)
C. Lueg (Univ Darvin, AU)
M. Rebstock (FH Darmstadt, DE)
M. Robinson (Univ Jyvaskyla, FI)
K.J. Rogers (Univ Texas Arlington, US)
G. Schwabe (Univ. Zuerich)
P. Tallon (Boston College, US)
Contact
-------
Tilo Bohmann
TUM - Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Phone +49 (0)89 289-19528
Fax +49 (0)89 289-19533
boehmann@in.tum.de
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