ICSOC 2012
10th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing
November 12-15, Shanghai, China
http://www.icsoc.org/

1st International Workshop on Service Clouds in the Enterprise and Beyond (SCEB'12)

Workshop Website

Workshop Summary:

The application of service oriented concepts to the management and coordination of people and work is a strongly emerging research topic as people collaborate towards a common goal in a dynamic ecosystem of partners, providers, and suppliers. Globalization, specialization, and rapid innovation are changing many aspects of both business and its operations. Many large organizations that were once self-sufficient and that could dictate processes to their service providers and suppliers are now finding this model unsustainable. To remain competitive and differentiate through innovation they must now collaborate as peers with specialized partners, service providers, and suppliers. Due to this increased complexity overall project failures, uncontrollable delays, and significant financial losses have been observed in many areas, such as global service delivery or the development of next generation passenger airplanes. This indicates the importance of finding new ways to support social-cloud based enterprise work, conceptually calling for a framework that will support a dynamic plug and play modularity of organizations in their different roles.

Many factors contribute to the intricacy of the problem of collaboration with service clouds between and in enterprises, including internal interdependency/complexity, external unpredictability, conflicts of interest, errors/faults, trust, reputation, conflict resolution, orderly rollbacks and termination of collaboration. Current approaches, including Service Oriented Computing (SOC), Business Process Management (BPM), Command and Control (C2), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Linguistics, and Crowd-sourcing, vary widely and address different aspects of the problem. Cohesive and comprehensive research relating these together and treating the problem in its totality remains to be done. Additionally, there is now a growing awareness about the next quantum leap in IT through social clouds to optimize how people do work in globally distributed ecosystems. Principled methods to coordinate and optimize collaborative work across enterprise boundaries have the potential to strongly impact business and society.

Many research problems are emerging in this theme. How social media helps people find the best suited services or people to collaborate organically in business processes to achieve a common goal? How to encourage peers to actively participate in cross-organization or even global collaboration? How to model and manage dynamic, flexible and elastic business processes in this globally distributed ecosystem? Many factors contribute to the intricacy of the problem of cross-enterprise collaboration.

The SCEB-workshop explores concepts and technologies that facilitate the management and coordination of people and services as they collaborate towards a common goal in a dynamic ecosystem of partners, providers, and suppliers in the service cloud environment. The workshop will serve as a forum for discussion among academic and industrial researchers as well as practitioners and students interested in addressing problems in the emerging area. Finally, the workshop will further provide an opportunity to bridge academia and industry in order to connect business needs with research efforts and apply research achievements into real-world practice.