While the pace of change in the business sector accelerates ever more, 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 therefore need the capability to respond quickly and efficiently to these challenges, and even to leverage them to competitive advantage. In this effort, they steadily transform themselves into becoming dynamic, proactive, connected, adaptive, or globally integrated organizations.

The objective of this special issue is to bring attention to emerging research in enterprise modeling (EM) – a catalyst for development of IT solutions capable to follow the business of today. In its foundational terms, EM addresses a systematic analysis and modeling of goals and processes, organization and products structures, IT-systems or any other perspective relevant for the modeling purpose. EM research 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 reinforce the role of EM in its responsibility to achieve alignment. Quality attributes such as agility, sensitivity, responsiveness, adaptability, autonomy, and interoperability are emerging as the norms for advanced enterprise models. It is no less important to develop methods to enable enterprise stakeholders to take advantage of those models in order to create business value.

The content of the special focus issue is therefore conceived of bringing together novel research results in EM and the topics from the best papers of the 6th and 7th IFIP WG 8.1 conference on the practice of enterprise modeling (PoEM) held in 2012 and 2013. The focus of the PoEM conference series is on advances in the PoEM through a forum for sharing knowledge and experiences between the academic community and practitioners from industry and the public sector. PoEM was initiated in 2008; since its foundation it has been hosted in Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Latvia, and the UK.

The six accepted papers reflect different topics of modern EM, including EM approaches addressing: business modeling for networked organizations; context-changing and capability-driven organizations; transformation and integration of models for improved use from data and service perspectives; visualization solutions for business modeling.

In addition to the research papers, the special issue includes two interviews with distinguished practitioners from the business sector: Mr. Sladjan Maras, Vice-President of Gartner, explaining practical problems and challenges of today’s organizations when doing EM; and Mr. Wolfgang Gaertner, Deutsche Bank’s chief information officer for retail, Germany, on the need for digitalization in organizations using models and software, particularly in retail banking.

We owe many thanks to the reviewers of this special issue for providing valuable reviews for the submitted papers.