1 Special Focus

The pace of change in business constantly accelerates, whereas the context for this change is becoming more complex. Today’s business environments entail cooperation with different organizations, rapidly changing business activities and processes, and an intensive competitive landscape. Enterprises need therefore the capability to respond quickly and efficiently to these challenges, and even to leverage them to competitive advantage. In this effort, they steadily transform to become dynamic, proactive, connected, adaptive, or globally-integrated organizations. Service orientation and cloud computing are the two enterprise-scale technologies showing high potential and promise in tackling continuous IT challenges.

The EM research discipline aims to solve business-IT alignment in a holistic manner by providing the techniques, languages, tools and best practices for using models to represent organizational knowledge and information systems from different perspectives. Described complex business and technology conditions upraise the role of Enterprise Modeling (EM) in its responsibility in reaching the alignment. The quality attributes such as agility, sensitivity, responsiveness, adaptability, autonomy, and interoperability are emerging as the norms for advanced enterprise models. Solving them will allow all components of an enterprise to operate together in the cooperative manner for the purpose of maximizing overall benefit to the enterprise.

The special issue aims to explore the enabling factors in EM to support the business-IT alignment in modern enterprises. It serves as a forum for researchers and practitioners to disseminate high-quality original research as well as case-studies of real-world enterprises in a leading international journal. Topics of interest include but are not limited to business applications in the areas:

  • Agile EM

  • Use of EM in different organizational and technical contexts

  • Adaptability in EM

  • Concordance between EM and information systems development

  • EM languages, references models, and tools

  • Evaluation of EM approaches, success factors in EM

  • EM case studies, practice feedback to EM research

  • EM management and governance

  • Reuse of enterprise models and modeling languages

2 Submission Guidelines

Authors are asked to submit their papers online under the category “BISE – Advanced Enterprise Modeling” by 2014-03-01 via the journal’s submission system Editorial Manager (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/). All papers must follow the typing and formatting instructions for WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK/Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) available at http://www.bise-journal.org. In particular, manuscripts should not exceed 50,000 characters (discounting 5,000 characters for each figure/table).

Submitted papers will undergo a double-blind review process and be refereed by at least three domain experts according to quality, originality, relevance, and scientific rigor.

3 Schedule

Paper submission due: 2014-03-01

Notification of authors: 2014-04-26

Revisions due: 2014-06-28

Completion of a second revision (if needed): 2014-09-20

Anticipated publication date: January 2015