Enterprise Systems and Technology: , Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Enterprise Systems and Technology - I-WEST 2008

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Enterprise Systems and Technology (I-WEST 2008), held on May 23 in Enschede, The Netherlands. The I-WEST workshop is a scientific event of IICREST, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology. I-WEST aims at providing a platform to researchers and practitioners, from academia and industry, to discuss challenges, solutions, ideas and experiences related to the broad field of enterprise systems and technology. Each year, a special theme is chosen within this broad field, in order to make presentations and discussions more focused. The theme of I-WEST 2008 is: Design of complex enterprise systems and aligned IT services. The past decade has witnessed important advances in both design approaches and technology-driven system capabilities. On the one hand, modeling approaches such as SOA and MDA have been complemented with techniques for expressing design intent at higher abstraction levels and keeping abstract models in sync with implementation-oriented models, thus increasing control over the design process. On the other hand, wireless networks, mobile computing, sensor networks and agent technologies created new application opportunities, primarily aiming at increasing availability, ease-of-use and sophistication of system capabilities, but at the same time leading to more complex systems with corresponding complex design processes. Although current enterprise technology essentially concerns the widely considered challenge of overcoming the business-technology gap, there are emerging requirements to enterprise systems, which further complicate the enterprise engineering process. Such requirements relate to desirable qualities concerning enterprise systems, such as contex-awareness, pro-activity, intelligence. Hence, these new demands need to be explicitly addressed by application developers. The goal of this workshop is to look at issues related to designing complex enterprise systems and aligned IT services. We are particularly interested in application opportunities offered by context-awareness, the design challenges that the incorporation of such properties in distributed environments bring, and how these challenges can be addressed in the design of enterprise systems that exploit these opportunities and IT services that provide appropriate support. I-WEST 2008 also has the intention to bring together researchers from various communities, including researchers working on enterprise engineering, context-aware systems, IT infrastructures, model-driven development and service-oriented architectures. The selected papers are a good illustration of different relevant topics that are currently under research: some papers are more oriented towards application development (considering this from the perspectives of enterprise ontology, requirements elicitation, and context awareness) while others are more SOA-oriented (considering service composition, utility computing, and process mediation).