IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference (IEEE APSCC 2008)

Mind the Gap - Minimizing the Gap between Business and IT

Workshop on Minimizing the Gap between Business and IT

Jiaosi, Yilan, Taiwan, December 9, 2008

During
IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference (IEEE APSCC 2008)
Cristal City, Jiaosi, Yilan, Taiwan, December 9-12, 2008

http://apscc2008.csie.chu.edu.tw/

Motivation

Companies have always wished to rapidly translate their strategic business objectives into operational reality. As the world has become progressively more IT dependent, translating objectives into practice inevitably necessitates an understanding of the businesses IT infrastructure and its capabilities. The advent of service oriented IT solution design, has made encapsulation of the IT infrastructure and related capabilities an even bigger prerogative. However, this potential has not been fully realized, the gap between the two domains continues to exist. This workshop is soliciting papers that describe methods, tools and models that present IT capabilities in readily business understandable frameworks and that enable Business Managers to describe their business needs without requiring intimate knowledge of IT. For example, is the value of Service Oriented Architecture for business managers achieved by putting the word business in front of every IT word in the vocabulary? While significant work has been reported from academia and industry, the solution to the above simple goals remains illusive. This workshop aims to develop an understanding of practical methods, tools and models that allow Business Managers to translate business operational strategy into an IT supported reality. The confluence of business models, business architecture, enterprise architecture and service-orientation offer an opportunity for renewed technical innovation, leveraging significant academic and industry work on business models. The organizers of this workshop anticipate receiving interest and papers that will address some of the current challenges, and aim to foster new opportunities based on the exchange of expertise. For example, some questions that the workshop would like to answer are;

What is the precise meaning and advantage in economic terms of modeling Business Services? How can these advantages be conveyed compellingly to business decision makers outside the IT domain?
Can entire industries be modeled and conceived as a collection of “service centers” along which value-chains deconstruct across ecosystem boundaries?
How do we model the connections between business artifacts coming from strategy definition or operational transformation efforts and IT artifacts such as applications?
Is SOA understandable and usable by a business manager making investment decisions, innovating in the model of a company or divesting services?
What methods and tools can assist business managers understand the limitations of their IT infrastructure to minimize risk in their business plans?

Topics of Interest

In this one-day workshop, we invite contributions, which describe methods, tools and models that are capable of presenting IT capabilities in readily business understandable frameworks and that enable Business Managers to describe their business needs without requiring intimate knowledge of IT.

Submission procedure

Important dates:

July 15 - workshop submission due
August 10 - acceptance notification
August 18 - send author list to IEEE
August 22 - IEEE sends final paper submission information to authors
Sept. 10 - final camera ready and registration due
Dec. 9 - Workshop held

All submissions must be limited to 8 pages following the IEEE format. Authors are requested to prepare submissions as close as possible to final camera-ready versions. 10% of the accepted submissions can be nominated for a special issue of the APSCC-08. The submission should clearly emphasize the discussion aspects relevant to the workshop. Members of an international program committee will review all submissions. For the rigorousness of the reviewing process, authors may also submit additional material such as screen dumps, images (e.g. PNG files), videos (e.g., MPEG, AVI files), demonstrations (e.g., Camtasia, SnagIt, Lotus ScreenCam) of software.

Submissions should be made electronically as PDF documents before the submission deadline using the online submission system: IEEE APSCC 2008 Mind the Gap Workshop Submission System
Authors are asked to create a submission system account first. Subsequently, this account can be used to submit one or more abstracts and upload corresponding papers.

For questions and comments, please contact the workshop co-chairs at kramerjo@us.ibm.com, jorges@us.ibm.com.

Workshop co-chairs addresses and affiliations

Joseph Kramer
IBM Watson Research Center
19 Skyline Drive
Hawthorne NY 10598
Tel.: +1 (914) 784-6051
E-mail: kramerjo@us.ibm.com

Jorge Sanz
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, California 95120
Tel.: +1 (914) 784-6051
E-mail: jorges@us.ibm.com

Workshop committee

TBD