2011 - Convergence of Business Architecture, Business Process Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture

Convergence of Business Architecture, Business Process Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture

The modernization of industries calls for a deeper integration of several business and IT disciplines. Significant knowledge sources reside in individual domains spanning business strategy, operational process management and information technology. A number of recent and ongoing engineering, computer science and business research efforts have provided invaluable formalization toward understanding architecture of organizations from a multidisciplinary point-of-view. These activities contribute to a potentially deeper integration across strategy, operations and IT by providing a diversity of assets useful for transformation of enterprises. Academic, industrial and standard organizations have made great progress in the individual disciplines and their cohesive convergence, but substantial challenges remain unresolved.

As a clear signal of this trend, several architecture endeavors populate the research and professional literature. Specifically, four architectures have clearly emerged, i.e., Business Process Architecture (BPA), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Architecture (BA), each posing the goal of providing technical rigor and convergence across their own communities of practitioners and researchers. However, the deep interconnection across these architectures and related practices present some formidable technical challenges. With the new positioning of Business Architecture coming from a revamp of interest from companies, government organizations, standards and business analysts, gaps, overlaps and related fundamental issues across architectures resurface. As a simple but conclusive example of the seminal cross-fertilization opportunity, Business Process Management (BPM) is today addressed by each SOA, EA and BA. Considering that BPM is a central subject in services business, the extent to which this commonality of concerns across architectures constitutes a redundancy, an oppositional view, or a complementarity remains to be explained. Similarly, "industry models" (in a wide and at times, also ambiguous sense) is a subject of research and practitioners' concern from different architecture and related BPM communities. There are several other important topics belonging to the same sphere of convergence that should be addressed in this Workshop.

> Objectives of the Workshop

The goal of this workshop is to generate some of the foundational ground needed from research and practice that can help BA, BPA, SOA and EA converge and / or be unified whenever necessary for more cohesive business transformation and optimization of organizations. Effective use of automation and supporting information technology in industries will be substantially accelerated by seeing BA, EA, BPA and SOA providing foundations and practices that conclusively benefit from each other and become much more prescriptive than they are when individually applied.. The goal of this workshop is to gather contributions from academia and industry to foster innovation, document position statements and seed common agendas across the involved disciplines.

> Types of Contributions

There will 4 types of papers in this workshop.

Position Papers. Technical vision with corresponding proof-points on different technical topics below, including industry needs for research activities in any of the involved domains.
Innovation Papers where novel ideas on the main subjects of the meeting are proposed.
Review Papers where solid account for technical literature are offered to
Industry-centric Papers where industrial applications are offered with solid examples and demonstrated practical impact.

> Technical Topics for Submissions

Business Architecture and Enterprise Architecture ? Converging and Diverging aspects. Are these practices just “scribing requirements” or are they truly actionable ?
Integration of conventional approaches to BPM with Enterprise Architecture / Business Architecture methods
BPM and SOA ? are they the same subject with two different names ?
Business Transformation: applications of the convergence across business, enterprise, process and service-oriented architectures to organization improvement
Industry-specific experiences in banking, telecommunications, insurance, governance, utilities, smart cities, and other segments of economic activity
Standards evolution in BPM, Business Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and SOA where interdisciplinary work will help a more effective adoption by communities of practice and end-users
Architecting the tacit: social aspects of organizations and their modeling
Where is “People” in the Architecture of Enterprises ? Why does it matter ?
Innovation in tooling outside the silos. Automation for one domain where value is driven by another domain
Governance issues in the individual domains:
a. Can any Center of Excellence do without pivoting on the other domains ?
b. Can we govern process change without an architecture of the business ?
c. Can we improve content reuse by integrating the four different architectures ?
d. Is architecting a disadvantage for achieving Business Agility ?

> Workshop Format

Please, submit your paper to the chairman at the email below: jorges-AT-us.ibm.com

At least one of the authors of an accepted paper has to be registered and present his/her paper in the workshop. All the accepted and registered papers will be grouped into several technical sessions for oral presentation plus a follow-on Q&A/discussion session.

> Workshop Schedule

Submission deadline: June 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2011
Camera-Ready copy due: July 10, 2011
Conference and Workshop program: TBA

> Workshop Organizers

Dr. Jorge Sanz, IBM Research, USA. Contact Email: jorges-AT-us.ibm.com
Prof. Leon Zhao, City University of Hong-Kong.