For decades, the information systems discipline has focused on the IT artefact as such: its organizational requirements, its development and management and its impact on business. Only recently we have begun to understand that information systems cannot be studied as either drivers of or driven by business. Information systems change the way we do business and businesses have changing requirements on information systems. We therefore need to co-design and co-engineer the organisations themselves together with the systems that support them.
In order to manage the co-design of organisations and information systems we need a powerful layer of abstraction that allows us to discuss different options for shaping an organisation and their respective merits and drawbacks before we put the most promising one into practice. In other words: we need a blueprint of an organisation in the same way that an architect needs a blueprint of a house, as an embodiment of design decisions and the consequences they have for the thing we are going to build.
In organisational design and engineering, this blue-print is called an enterprise model. Enterprise models have a large number of stakeholders with vested and often conflicting interests in the way the organisation and its systems are designed: representatives from different involved departments and other organisational units, process managers, change managers, IT project managers, business analysts, and software developers, to name but a few. Enterprise modelling is therefore a social and highly collaborative process that involves collective sense-making, ideation, negotiation, consensus building and the like. In this special issue we therefore solicit research work that highlights the collaborative nature of enterprise modelling.
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- The nature of the collaborative modelling process
- Collaborative modelling methods and tools
- Measures of model quality and quality of the modelling process
- Methods for controlling and improving model(ling) quality
- Methods for consensus building
- Negotiation and decision support in collaborative modelling
- Supporting collaborative sense-making and mutual understanding in modelling
- Supporting idea creation and evaluation as well as idea convergence
- Other issues related to collaborative modelling
Deadline for submission of papers: 15 February 2011
Deadline for peer reviewing: 15 April 2011
Deadline for submission of final versions: 15 May 2011
Final acceptance of papers: 15 June 2011
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