Modern enterprises face a strong pressure to increase agility and competitiveness, to operate on the global market, and to engage in manifold alliances. However, the vast majority of strategic initiatives in enterprises fail, meaning that enterprises are unable to gain success from their strategy. The key reason for these failures is the lack of coherence and consistency among the various components of an enterprise. At the same time, the need to operate as a unified and integrated whole is becoming increasingly important. Currently, these challenges are dominantly addressed from a functional or managerial perspective, as advocated by the management and organization sciences, and as implemented in MBA programs. Such knowledge is indeed necessary for managing an enterprise, but it is inadequate for bringing about changes in a fully systematic and integrated way. To do that, one needs to take a constructional or engineering perspective.

In addition, both organizations and software applications are complex systems, prone to entropy. This means that in the course of time, the costs of bringing about similar changes increase in a way that is known as combinatorial explosion. Entropy can be reduced and managed effectively through modular design based on atomic elements.

Lastly, the individual persons in an enterprise, in cooperation, are ultimately responsible for the effective and efficient operation of the enterprise. They are also collectively responsible for the evolution of the enterprise, in order to meet new challenges. These responsibilities can only be borne if members have an appropriate knowledge and an effective awareness of the construction of the enterprise given by a sound engineering aproach.
Focus and Goal

The Enterprise Engineering Working Conference 2014 is the fourth working conference in the emerging field of Enterprise Engineering. The goal of the conference is to gather academics and practitioners in order to share innovative research issues and practical experiences, and to facilitate profound discussions about the challenges mentioned above. It is the mission of the discipline of Enterprise Engineering to develop new, appropriate theories, models, methods and other artifacts for the analysis, design, implementation, and governance of enterprises by combining (relevant parts of) management and organization science, information systems science, and computer science. The ambition is to address traditional topics in said disciplines from the Enterprise Engineering Paradigm. The result of the efforts should be theoretically rigorous and practically relevant.

Topics of interest to this working conference include, but are not limited to:

Business Process Management
Business Process Modeling and Simulation
Business Rules
Business Rules Management
Collaborative, Participative, and Interactive Modeling
Component-Based System Development
Domain Ontologies
Domain Reference Ontologies
Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Governance
Enterprise Modeling and Simulation
Enterprise Ontology
Information System Architectures
Information System Ontologies
Information Systems Design
Information Systems Development
Interoperability Testing and Verification
Modeling (cross-enterprise) Business Processes
Ontology-based Web Services
Participatory Systems
Reference Models for (cross-enterprise) Business Processes
Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Design