Modern organizations rely on complex configurations of distributed IT systems that implement key business processes, provide databases, data warehousing, and business intelligence. The current business environment requires organizations to comply with a range of externally defined regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and BASEL II.

Organizations need to be increasingly agile, robust, and be able to react to complex events, possibly in terms of dynamic reconfiguration.

In order to satisfy these complex requirements, large organizations are increasingly using Enterprise Modelling (EM) technologies to analyze their business units, processes, resources and IT systems, and to show how these elements satisfy the goals of the business. EM describes all aspects of the construction and analysis of organizational models and supports enterprise use cases including:

Business Alignment: elements of a business are shown to meet its goals.
Business Change Management: as-is and to-be models are used to plan how a business is to be changed.
Governance and Compliance: models are used to show that processes are in place to comply with regulations.
Acquisitions and Mergers: models are used to analyze the effect of combining two or more businesses.
Enterprise Resource Planning: models are used to analyze the use of resources within a business and to show that given quality criteria are achieved.

Emerging technologies, methods and techniques currently proposed for EM include:

Modelling Languages: including UML; SysML; ArchiMate; MODAF; TOGAF.
Enterprise Views: stakeholder identification; multiple linguistic communities.
Enterprise Patterns: an organization is shown to conform to general (possibly executable) organizational principles.
Event Driven Architectures: constructing enterprise architectures based on complex events.
Enterprise Simulation: executing configurations of organizational units in order to analyse and verify performance.

General Author Information

The Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) invites original, high-quality submissions for its theme issue on Enterprise Modelling (EM). The aim of the theme issue is to bring together a collection of articles that describe a range of EM technologies and approaches in order to provide the reader with a single resource that captures the state of art. The theme issue will include an introduction to the field, an overview of the leading-edge languages and technologies used to undertake EM, and in-depth analysis of techniques or approaches for specific use-cases of EM.

Papers must be written in a scientifically rigorous manner with adequate references to related work.

Submitted papers must not be simultaneously submitted in an extended form or in a shortened form to other journals or conferences. It is however possible to submit extended versions of previously published work if less than 75% of the content already appeared in a non-journal publication, or less than 40% in a journal publication. Please see the SoSyM Policy Statement on Plagiarism for further conditions.

Submitted papers do not need to adhere to a particular format or page limit, but should be prepared using font “Times New Roman” with a font size no smaller than 11 pt, and with 1.5 line spacing. Please consult the SoSyM author information for submitting papers.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.

Communicate your intent to submit a paper by emailing the theme issue editors the following information before the Intent to Submit deadline: Title, Authors, and an Abstract.

Prepare your submission with either Word or LaTeX using Word and LaTeX templates. Possible submission formats are:

Word (.doc, without macros)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
PostScript (.ps, special fonts must be embedded)
PDF (saved as readable in version 5.0 or later)

Submit your work using the online system manuscript central:

In step 1, select “Special Section Paper” as the manuscript type and select “Dr. Bernhard Rumpe” as the “Editor-in-Chief” (EIC).
In step 4, add: Balbir Barn (+ b.barn@mdx.ac.uk), Alan Brown (+ awbrown@us.ibm.com), Tony Clark (+ t.n.clark@ mdx.ac.uk) or Florian Matthes (+ matthes@in.tum.de) as an editor and choose “Designate as Preferred Editor”.
In step 5, make sure field “Cover Letter” includes the line: “Submission for Theme Issue on EM”.

If you have any questions about this theme issue, please contact the editors.