From May 5th to May 8th the international academic conference "4th Enterprise Engineering Conference" will be held at Funchal in Hotel Vida Mar. The subject of this conference is the innovative discipline known as Enterprise Engineering (EE), born from the Information Systems Engineering discipline and intending to contribute to solve the serious problem of 75% of IT projects failing to achieve the expectations and needs of users. The solution involves developing theories, methods and tools suitable for analysis and reliable representation of the structural and operational reality of any company/organization (whether public or private) before initiatives of automation based on Information Technologies (IT). A major cause of many failures in IT projects is precisely an incomplete and/or ambiguous understanding of organizational reality, leading to incomplete or inadequate IT systems.
This conference will present some of the latest and most innovative scientific and practical developments towards these theories and methods. The program includes: two talks (keynotes) of distinguished personalities in the field of EE from Germany and USA; lectures presenting practical cases of implementation of EE initiatives, where we highlight the presentation of ongoing work to modernize the Portuguese public administration; a Doctoral Consortium, with presentations of results of doctoral theses in progress; and several sessions for presentation of papers accepted for publication in the proceedings of this conference. The full conference program - including titles and presenters - can be found on the conference Internet page: http://ciaonetwork.org/eewc2014.
This conference is organized by Prof. David Aveiro of the University of Madeira (UMa), being the member representing this University in the international EE research network known as CIAO!, acronym for Cooperation, Interoperability, Architecture and Ontology - fundamental concepts in the EE discipline. This network brings together renowned Universities and Institutes in various countries, namely: the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Czech Republic, United States, Russia, Japan, Portugal and Brazil.
The entrance of Brazil in this network, with the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) - the second largest university in the country - is the latest and is a result of efforts by Prof. David Aveiro for the dissemination of the EE discipline in Brazil, which are having as a result the establishment of a formal protocol between UMa and UFMG, aiming for the conduction of joint research and programs for exchange of PhD students undertaking theses in this area. It is noteworthy that UMa itself has a PhD in progress looking at applying EE to improve and modernize some of its processes.
The official opening session of the conference will take place on Tuesday, May 6, from 09:00 to 09:30 am, at Hotel Vida Mar, with interventions by: the leader and founder of CIAO! network - Prof. Jan Dietz from Holland; conference organizers - Prof. David Aveiro and Prof. José Tribolet; and also the Vice-Rector of UMa responsible for projects, research and external relations - Prof . José Manuel Baptista.
