[AISWorld] CFP for HICSS minitrack on Enterprise Systems Integration: Issues and Answers

[Paulo Rupino Cunha]

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit your manuscripts to our mini-track "Enterprise Systems Integration: Issues and Answers" at the 47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS).

The mini-track description and CFP can be found at http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_47/track/os/OS-Integration.pdf

Submission deadline is June 15, 2013. Other important dates available at: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_47/47cfp.pdf

Warm regards,

Marinos, Gail and Paulo


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ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY

Minitrack: Enterprise System Integration: Issues and Answers

The lack of application integration is widely considered as a barrier for the automation of business processes. During the last decades, organizations have turned to the adoption of Enterprise Systems (ES, also known as ERP) and now to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to address these challenges. ES are integrated suites that are becoming mature technologies in many organizations. Accordingly, a considerable body of research has been devoted to this important area. The academic and professional literature has described the use of these systems to consolidate and refine the business processes within an organization (intra-organizational business processes). This normative literature also shows, however, that this intra-organizational integration is frequently achieved by the replacement of most of the existing systems by the ES. Coexistence of ES and existing systems remains problematic. This issue is even more complex when automating inter-organizational business processes and value chains or after a merger or acquisition.

Service Oriented Architecture offers a way to address these problems, with ES vendors recognizing the importance of its solutions and practices. More recently, vendors also turned to Cloud Computing, due to its synergies with SOA. The major ERP vendors are currently attacking these issues, but often with proprietary solutions. A more active involvement by the academic research community should allow for the establishment of a more open and standardized SOA/Cloud environment.

Topics or research questions that are of particular interest include the following:

	• How does ES and the migration towards SOA and the cloud evolve or change the university or college curriculum?

	• What are the true costs and benefits of ES/SOA/cloud installations? Have expectations been realized? How do we know? Is cloud changing this reality?

	• How are ES being adopted by organizations? What changes do organizations go through to get and deploy an ES? What resulting changes occur after the ES is implemented? Anticipated or not?

	• What are the common challenges and opportunities associated with integrating solutions within an enterprise? Across enterprises?

	• How do you keep and hire ES specialists? How are organizations addressing the shortage of ES specialists? How can colleges help with the shortage?

	• How do you manage the software development process in an ES implementation? How can project management and change management research be applied here? How is cloud adoption changing ES project implementations?

	• What is the real value of hands-on experience with ES/SOA/cloud in college curricula?

	• How are ES systems being extended beyond the internal business processes? What types of system-to-system interfaces are being used?

	• What SOA standards need to be in place for future expansion of ES systems?

	• What are some of the issues surrounding ES usage, implementation, etc. when companies merge or use different ES systems to meet different needs of the same but diverse organization?

	• What are the benefits, barriers, costs of SOA and cloud technology?

	• What factors influence SOA adoption and use?

	• What is the role of Business Process Management/Modeling when deploying an ES?

	• What are the implementation methodologies and the best practices for integrating business systems?

	• How can we measure ES and SOA/cloud performance?

	• What are the emerging business models or what comes after SOA?

	• What are the organizational, political, legal, and cultural barriers related with ERP/ SOA/cloud Computing adoption?

	• ES in the cloud

	• ES and the Internet of Services