In the past 10 years, e-commerce and enterprise computing have emerged into an engineering discipline and a design science centered on technical artifacts for service integration and business process optimization. The term business processes is being used broadly in the sense of any ordering of work activities inside and between enterprises, as well as enterprises and end consumers, and may include real and virtual organizations, real and virtual work force, handling internal and market triggered events.

While enterprise computing is traditionally focused more on internal business processes and e-commerce describes the various interactions with external entities, this distinction is increasingly difficult to make in a networked economy. Needless to say, both areas have seen enormous technical developments throughout the past few years and face similar challenges.

The last decade, for example, has seen enormous efforts in the area of integration technology, such as web services computing, which, at the same time, has led to a lot of standardization and commoditization in the field. This doesn’t mean that innovation stops. Once products become commodities, they can serve as components for further innovation. An obvious consequence of the advances in web services computing is that it enables business services networks, which pose a number of new technical challenges focused on how to support collaboration and orchestrate and optimize processes across organizations.

Another challenge and a consequence of the availability of business services networks, broadband network connections, and RFID technology is the resulting “information explosion”. Businesses collect huge amounts of data on customers, suppliers and market developments and need to be able to analyze and react on this quickly.

Next generation enterprise software needs to handle the dynamism and uncertainties in business environments such as short planning cycles, multiple value chain dependencies, and intelligent sensing and quick response driven by an understanding of external and internal status for business optimization. Scientific methods such as knowledge discovery and data mining, forecasting, stochastic modelling and optimization will become pivotal in making this vision a reality.

The study of real-time enterprise is needed to support the vision of using up-to-date information to accelerate the speed for business process optimization and ultimately for competitive advantage. Real-time enterprise software should transform business operations so that enterprises may sense and respond to changes in their environment in real time, business services are automated and delivered with a great agility.

As the theme of the 2006 CEC/EEE joint event, we especially encourage submissions addressing some of these challenges in building real-time enterprises. Special conference theme tracks, invited talks and panel discussion are being planned. We also are considering the publication of some selected theme papers in special issues of transactions and journals. Please contact the conference co-chair K. J. Lin if you have any proposal or suggestion on the theme program.

M. Bichler, KJ Lin, S.-T. Yuan, IEEE CEC/EEE Steering Committee

Phillip Yu, IEEE CEC/EEE Program Committee Chair