Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus: 108 (IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology) - Softcover

The international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organisational Integration (EI3-IC) had the objective to increase both international consen­ sus (IC) and public awareness on enterprise integration. In these proceedings we intend to present the current status in inter- and intra-organisational inte­ gration for electronic commerce and thereby to further increase awareness and consensus within academia and industry about enterprise inter-and intra­ organisational integration. The conference proceedings contain the papers presented at the ICEIMT conference in Valencia, Spain, selected papers presented at the different workshops and three papers on the initiative itself: overview, history and results. The proceedings follow the conference structure with each section (Parts 2 to 5) starting with the workgroup reports, followed by a particular view on the section theme and additional papers either presented at the con­ ference or during the related workshop. Section editorials discuss the differ­ ent contributions. As stated in the paper by Nell and Goranson in section 1 the results from all workshops indicate the important role of business processes in the area of e-commerce and virtual enterprises. Sharing relevant knowledge between co­ operating partners and making it available for decision support at all levels of management and across organisational boundaries will significantly en­ hance the trust between the partners on the different levels of partner opera­ tions (strategy, policy, operation and transaction). Clearly business process modelling can significantly enhance establishment, operation and decom­ mission of the required collaboration.

The new organizational paradigms of global cooperation and collaboration require new ways and means for their support. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can and will play a significant role in this support. However, the many currently available and seemingly conflicting solutions, the confusing terminology, the lack of business justification, and last but not least the insufficient understanding of the technology by the end user community has significantly hampered the large scale application of the relevant ICT support and thereby the acceptance of the new paradigms. Many of these issues have been addressed in the workshops of the international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration, which has been supported by the European IST Programme and NIST. The main subjects of the initiative: relations between knowledge management and business process modeling, interoperability of business processes and process models, enterprise engineering and integration, and representation of process models. Ontologies and agent technologies - the latter with their relations to ontologies and models - have been further subjects of discussions in several workshops. Results of the initiative are reported in this volume, which comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology (ICEIMT'02). The conference was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valencia, Spain in April 2002. Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus provides not only a wealth of information on the state of the art of the subjects of the initiative, it also identifies opportunities for research and development. Potential projects are identified in the work group reports and some of those will be taken up by organizations involved.