One of the trends in the global market is the increasing collaboration among ent- prises.
Constant changes in inter- and intra-organizational environments will persist in the future.
Organizations have to flexibly and continuously react to (imminent) changes in markets and
trading partners. Large companies but also SMEs have to cope with internal changes from both a
technical (e.g. new information communi- tion software and hardware technologies) and an
organizational point of view (e.g. merging re-organization virtual organizations etc.). In
this context the competiti- ness of an enterprise depends not only on its internal performance
to produce products and services but also on its ability to seamlessly interoperate with other
enterprises. External and internal collaborative work needs more interoperable solutions. The
International Workshop on Enterprise Interoperability IWEI aims at identi- ing and discussing
challenges and solutions with respect to enterprise interoperability both at the business and
the technical level. The workshop promotes the development of a scientific foundation for
specifying analyzing and validating interoperability solutions an architectural framework for
addressing interoperability problems from different viewpoints and at different levels of
abstraction a maturity model to eva- ate and rank interoperability solutions with respect to
distinguished quality criteria and a working set of practical solutions and tools that can be
applied to interoperab- ity problems to date. IWEI is organized by the IFIP Working Group 5.8
on Enterprise Interoperability.
