The new organizational paradigms of global cooperation and collaboration require new ways and means for their support. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can and will play a significant role in this support. However, the many currently available and seemingly conflicting solutions, the confusing terminology, the lack of business justification, and last but not least the insufficient understanding of the technology by the end user community has significantly hampered the large scale application of the relevant ICT support and thereby the acceptance of the new paradigms.

Many of these issues have been addressed in the workshops of the international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration, which has been supported by the European IST Programme and NIST. The main subjects of the initiative: relations between knowledge management and business process modeling, interoperability of business processes and process models, enterprise engineering and integration, and representation of process models. Ontologies and agent technologies - the latter with their relations to ontologies and models - have been further subjects of discussions in several workshops.

Results of the initiative are reported in this volume, which comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology (ICEIMT'02). The conference was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valencia, Spain in April 2002.

Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus provides not only a wealth of information on the state of the art of the subjects of theinitiative, it also identifies opportunities for research and development. Potential projects are identified in the work group reports and some of those will be taken up by organizations involved.

Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes introduces a modeling method, Integrated Enterprise Modelling' (IEM), which is related to ISO standards and provides manufacturing organizations with the means of analyzing, improving, and redesigning their business processes. The purpose of the book is to improve the quality of products and organizational performance through optimizing complex business processes and organizational design. Clearly, changing markets and innovative competitors force each company to study and improve its organization, its business processes, and the technologies it employs. Whoever drops behind in these times loses market share and endangers the long-term existence of the company. Hence, it is critical to realign the entire corporate planning and design throughout the value-added chain to speed up the business processes. The book is the result of a scientific study funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology. The authors develop the concept of Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes, which is the underlying motivation for IEM. Moreover IEM is the engine for achieving the integration of quality management into the design and planning of business processes. The book discusses the IEM method thoroughly and applies it to the concept of Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes' throughout the book. This concept is illustrated with an example of a company. A computer-aided tool kit, called MOOGO (on a CD-ROM), is provided with the book. This software tool kit enables an organization to involve all appropriate personnel for purposes of modelling and optimizing business processes. Finally, the book describes the entry of the IEM methodinto national, European and international standardization.

The new organizational paradigms of global cooperation and collaboration require new ways and means for their support. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can and will play a significant role in this support. However, the many currently available and seemingly conflicting solutions, the confusing terminology, the lack of business justification, and last but not least the insufficient understanding of the technology by the end user community has significantly hampered the large scale application of the relevant ICT support and thereby the acceptance of the new paradigms. Many of these issues have been addressed in the workshops of the international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration, which has been supported by the European IST Programme and NIST. The main subjects of the initiative: relations between knowledge management and business process modeling, interoperability of business processes and process models, enterprise engineering and integration, and representation of process models.Ontologies and agent technologies - the latter with their relations to ontologies and models - have been further subjects of discussions in several workshops. Results of the initiative are reported in this volume, which comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology (ICEIMT'02). The conference was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valencia, Spain in April 2002. Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus provides not only a wealth of information on the state of the art of the subjects of the initiative, it also identifies opportunities for research and development. Potential projects are identified in the work group reports and some of those will be taken up by organizations involved.

Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes introduces a modeling method, `Integrated Enterprise Modelling' (IEM), which is related to ISO standards and provides manufacturing organizations with the means of analyzing, improving, and redesigning their business processes. The purpose of the book is to improve the quality of products and organizational performance through optimizing complex business processes and organizational design. Clearly, changing markets and innovative competitors force each company to study and improve its organization, its business processes, and the technologies it employs. Whoever drops behind in these times loses market share and endangers the long-term existence of the company. Hence, it is critical to realign the entire corporate planning and design throughout the value-added chain to speed up the business processes. The book is the result of a scientific study funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology. The authors develop the concept of Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes, which is the underlying motivation for IEM. Moreover IEM is the engine for achieving the integration of quality management into the design and planning of business processes. The book discusses the IEM method thoroughly and applies it to the concept of `Quality-Oriented Design of Business Processes' throughout the book. This concept is illustrated with an example of a company. Finally, the book describes the entry of the IEM method into national, European and international standardization.