Workshop Program on October 30th, 2023

All times in Central European Time

15.30 – 15.40    Opening – Faiza Allah Bukhsh and Maya Daneva, Workshop Co-Chairs

15.40—16.50    Paper Presentations and Discussion

An Enterprise Coherence Quantification Framework for General Enterprise Architecting

Authors: Joost Bekel, Roel Wagter, Henderik Proper and Frank Harmsen

Discussant: Faiza Allah Bukhsh

Monitoring Value Chains of Organic Beverages: Strategic Modeling of a Case Study

Authors: Hugo D. Santos, Patrício de A. Silva, Marcos E. Cintra, Francisco M. Mendes Neto and Faiza A. Bukhsh

Discussant: Joost Bekel

16.50 -- 17.00 Closing of iRESEARCH'2023

******

Workshop Chairs:

Maya Daneva, University of Twente, Email: m.daneva@utwente.nl

Faiza Allah Bukhsh, University of Twente, Email: f.a.bukhsh@utwente.nl

Workshop description

The purpose of the 1st edition of the International Workshop on Empirical Methodologies for Research in Enterprise Architecture and Service-oriented Computing (iRESEARCH) at EDOC’23 is to initiate the conversation on shaping the cross-fertilization of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-oriented Computing (SOC) and Empirical Research Methodologies (ERM). The workshop goals are: (a) to open up the interdisciplinary debate on the steadily moving frontiers in empirical methodologies in support of EA and SOC research projects, and (b) to expand the network of researchers designing and conducting empirical studies in EA and in the sub-fields of SOC, which in turn will lead to the cross-fertilization between these two fields and ERM.

EDOC is a well-established community of researchers proposing a wide range of approaches, techniques, and tools that address various problems in the disciplines of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-oriented Computing (SOC). Systematic efforts to evaluate and compare usefulness, effectiveness, and utility of such proposals resulted in a growing attention to methods for empirical assessment. Design science, action research, case studies and experiments, hence, become indispensable and valuable ways to check proposals with respect to the reality, thus allowing to understand their actual value, cost, and benefits in particular contexts. The iRESEARCH workshop invites scientists in EA and SOC to exchange ideas on why and how the empirical research methods can help to assess and improve existing or new approaches in EA and SOC.

The targeted outcomes of this workshop include the identification of open research problems and the possible solutions to these problems, regarding:

1. Evaluation and comparison of EA and service-oriented methods, processes and tools in context;
2. Emerging research methods;
3. New and unexpected forms of collaboration with industrial partners in empirical research projects;
4. Evaluation of transferability of empirical results to practice.

Workshop Topics

The workshop topics include all those concerns related to the application of empirical research methods in EA and SOC. In particular:

• Design science and action research as methods for doing research with practitioners and for practitioners;
• Emerging research methods, e.g. leveraging data-centric intelligent systems;
• Surveys on state-of-the-art EA practices in industry;
• Systematic reviews and mapping studies on EA and SOC phenomena;
• Qualitative studies: case studies, focus groups, grounded theory, interview-based studies;
• Different types of approaches to evaluate validity of results of EA and SOC research;
• Experimental designs for empirical studies; frameworks and infrastructures for carrying out empirical studies;
• Lessons learned from empirical research in industry-university collaboration settings;
• Frameworks for comparative evaluations;
• Identification of strengths and weaknesses of empirical and comparative evaluation approaches.
• Use of theories in EA and SOC research.

Application domains: We welcome empirical research papers in all domains.

Types of Submissions

We welcome submissions by four types: (i) industry reports, (ii) position papers, (iii) research design papers, (iv) full technical papers. All the papers should be related to the topics of interest listed above.

• Industry reports (max 4 pages). These are papers on problem statements or challenges encountered in real-life organizations or examples of successes/failures of empirical EA and SOC research in practice.
• Position papers (max 4 pages). These are short papers that can be either (a) a paper on the position of the author/s on any of the topics within the scope of the workshop, or (b) an empirical research design that will be improved as a result of feedback from workshop participants, or (c) visionary papers exploiting new ideas about the contribution of the empirical methods in EA and SOC. For instance, a position paper can propose new criteria to empirically assess EA methods and techniques, or it can introduce new areas for relevant empirical studies.
• Research Design papers (max 4 pages). Short papers written by PhD students presenting the experimentation/empirical design they performed/plan to perform during their research work.
• Full technical papers (max 8 pages). Full papers that describe empirical experiences in EA and SOC and reporting the results of such experiences. For example, a full paper might describe how an architecture modelling approach has been evaluated in a real context or in a laboratory scenario, or how two modelling approaches have been compared in practice.

All papers submitted to the workshop will be peer-reviewed by three members of the Program Committee. Acceptance will be primarily based on originality, contribution to the area, ability to generate discussion, quality of the paper and of the research, and research completeness. Research design papers will be reviewed, but more “helpfully” than “critically”. Only original papers not submitted to journals or other conferences will be considered.

Program Committee

• Jelena Zdravkovic, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel 
• Hajo Reijers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands 
• Jeewanie Jayasinghe Arachchige, University of Twente, The Netherlands 
• Oscar Pastor, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
• Hans Weigand, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
• Selmin Nurcan, University of Paris, France (to be confirmed)
• Stefanie Ronderle-Ma, TUM, Germany (to be confirmed)
• Barbara Weber University of St Gallen, Switzerland (to be confirmed)
• Patrizio De Alencar Silva, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil   
• Said Assar, Ecole de Mines, France (to be confirmed)