Preface
Enterprise modeling (EM) has gained substantial popularity both in the academic
community and among practitioners. A variety of EM methods, approaches, and tools
are developed and offered on the market. In practice they are used for various pur-
poses such as business strategy development, process restructuring, as well as business
and IT architecture alignment and governance.
PoEM 2008, the First IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on The Practice of Enter-
prise Modeling, took place in Stockholm, Sweden. It is the first conference aiming to
establish a dedicated forum where the use of EM in practice is addressed by bringing
together researchers, users, and practitioners. The goals of PoEM 2008 were to de-
velop a better understanding of the practice of EM, to contribute to improved EM
practice, as well as to share knowledge and experiences.
The theme of PoEM 2008 was EM in different application contexts, e.g., software
development, including agile development, as well as business development, govern-
ance, and change. We focused on the following topics: evaluation of EM methods
from a practice perspective, the process of modeling and guidelines for modeling,
management of EM projects, use of EM in different contexts, facilitation and group
dynamics, the competency of modelers and modeling teams, model and process qual-
ity aspects, reuse of enterprise models, modeling languages, the use of EM in different
contexts, tools and workbenches, enterprise model management, success factors in
EM, teaching the practice, EM and agile development, enterprise knowledge architec-
tures, standardization issues and reference models, method engineering in EM, con-
cordance between EM and information systems development.
The focus area of PoEM 2008 attracted 34 submissions from 16 countries, out of
which the Program Committee selected 17 high-quality papers. The resulting program
reflects the fact that the topic of EM encompasses human and organizational issues as
well as technical aspects of information systems engineering. The program also featured
a keynote by Björn Nilsson, one of Sweden's most experienced EM practitioners. To
stimulate open exchange of ideas PoEM 2008 also included two joint brainstorming
sessions on the emerging challenges of EM.
We devote a special thanks to the members of the International Program Committee
for promoting the conference and for providing excellent reviews of the submitted pa-
pers. Their dedicated work was vital for putting together a high-quality working confer-
ence. A special thanks goes to the University of Skövde, Jönköping University, and the
Royal Institute of Technology for supporting the organization of the conference.
The PoEM 2008 organizers would also like to thank the conference sponsor –
Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST), Germany.
July 2008 Janis Stirna
Anne Persson
