Conference experience Andra Balmus MSc.

At the beginning of September, 2011 (5-7 September), I participated in the 13th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC). The conference took place in Luxembourg, at the Research Center Tudor Henri, and it brought together both researchers from academia and practitioners from IBM, SAP, Capgemini and Ernst & Young, among many others. Across the three days, there were two main events incorporated - the workshops session and the actual sessions for the accepted conference papers.


During the first day, I attended only one of the 3 available all-day workshops – specifically the one on "Convergence of Business Architecture, Business Process Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture". There were some extremely interesting discussions concerning various topics, such as: the problems experienced by worldwide companies with respect to process integration and simplification, new techniques of preparing your enterprise architecture for the future, or the latest paradigms and industry models applied for business process management. All topics touched upon not only current problematic issues and how they are tackled with in different areas, but also some future research points, that I am sure students will be taught about in the following months. 


Secondly, the actual presentations accepted for the conference covered a wide range of topics, from knowledge management, e-commerce and cloud computing management, to business process management and enterprise architectures. My paper was included in the session on “Trading and Contracting”, where four papers aimed to inform the participants on possible means of collaboration between two parties - be those computer agents, human parties in a value chain or intelligent entities. For the presentation of my paper, I was excited and curious to see how the audience would react. As my first experience of such kind, I was looking forward to receiving as many comments as possible and thus, I was very happy that my presentation ignited quite some questions. The questions helped me pinpoint areas that should be carefully considered during an academic research.


Furthermore, the two guest speakers brought a spark of creativeness to the conference as well. They presented issues, which, albeit not completely new, were good food for thought. Dr. Yves Pigneur, professor of Information Systems at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, presented concepts from his book which I had used multiple times for some of my projects at university ("Business Model Generation", written in collaboration with Alex Osterwalder). It was quite interesting to listen to what I had applied in our IS projects from one of the actual authors. The second guest speaker was Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, who introduced a new concept he had been working on - Customer Experience Management – CX (Customer Experience). The area involves architects considering the effects and possible consequences that the multitude of electronic communication and social media can have on the way companies design their enterprise architectures.


All in all, my participation in the conference was a very good experience and I am really looking forward to participating at other such conferences or workshops in the future! I felt very happy to see that my research, which I had completed under the guidance of my great UT professors and company supervisor, finally received some acknowledgement in research, as well! I made some good connections and had a lot of discussions on various topics with some knowledgeable persons in the area, all of which left me thinking about the possibility of pursuing a PhD in the future! I