Collaboration and Interoperability Support for Agile Enterprises in a Networked World: Emerging Scenarios, Research Challenges, Enabling Technologies

The economic success of enterprises increasingly depends on their ability to react to changes in their environment in a quick and flexible way. Examples of such environmental changes include regulatory adaptations (e.g. introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II), market evolution, altered customer behavior, process improvement, and strategy shifts. Companies have therefore identified business agility as a competitive advantage required for coping with business trends like increasing product and service variability, faster time-to-market, and increasing division of labor along the supply chain. In particular, the agile enterprise should be able to quickly set up new business processes as well as to adapt existing ones. However, networked enterprises must not accomplish such business process changes independent from the interactions they have with their partners and customers; e.g., business contracts and business compliance rules must be ensured after business process changes as well. This keynote will discuss major research challenges to be tackled in this context. Further, it will present advanced methods, concepts and technologies enabling collaboration and interoperability support for the agile enterprise in a networked world.