Overview

1. Trend setting: From eIntegration to Value Creation
2. BLED conference – eIntegration in action
3. ICE 2005 conference – Integration of products, services and organizations
4. News
5. Events

1. Trend setting: From eIntegration to Value Creation

• BLED 2005 Conference in Bled, Slovenia and
• ICE 2005 Conference in Munich Germany show healthy development in participant numbers and several new formats and services.

While ICE 2005 did focus on the “Integration of products, services and organizations” for the design of integrated customer solutions, Bled 2005 brought together a view on “eIntegration in action” in several industries as research and education, business, and trade. The Ami@Work action day on the ICE conference demonstrated the integration of collaboration technologies around ten application domains. The consistent message that emerges from the two conferences is that the abundance of modular information technology as well as the methodologies for integration have reached the necessary level of maturity for rapid take-up in the near future.

Both conferences as well convene that Value Creation will become a key issue on the research agenda for the virtual enterprise community. The Bled conference calls for papers on eValue for next year. The vast range of technical and organizational possibilities calls for direction: what is wanted? What is waste and what does create value? Such questions are relevant for practitioners, who need to validate their business cases, direct product and service development, or simply account for knowledge work. These questions raise fundamental academic issues at the same time. For example, what is productivity of knowledge workers or collaborating professionals and how can these be measured? We look forward to insights at next summer’s conferences.

2. BLED conference – eIntegration in action

The 18th Bled eConference “eIntegration in Action”, June 6-8, 2005: http://www.BledConference.org  
has attracted 230 participants from 30 countries. In the program, 50 research papers were accepted focusing on the various aspects of eIntegration. In addition to the research papers track, the following components are the tradition of the Bled eConference: panels, meetings, and workshops. For example:

• eUniversity Forum: eIntegration Challenges for Rectors and Deans:
  http://www.BledConference.org/eUniversityForum;
• eSilk & eAmber Road Regions Meeting: Business and Government Executives & Professors’ Commitment To Making A Difference:
  http://www.BledConference.org/eAmber&eSilkRoad;
• Business & Government Executive Meeting on Cross-border eRegion:  http://www.BledConference.org/ExecutiveMeeting;
• ePrototype Bazaar: The Undergraduate and Graduate Students Prototype Presentation
  http://www.BledConference.org/StudentsBazaar.

Preparations for the next, 19th Bled eConference “eValues”, June 5-7, 2006 have started.
The research track chairs are: Pirkko Walden, Professor & Research Director, Department of Information Systems & Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, Åbo Akademi University, Finland, Pirkko.Walden@ABO.fi &
M. Lynne Markus, John W. Poduska, Sr. Professor of Information Management, Management Department, Bentley College, United States, MLMarkus@Bentley.edu.

Authors are welcome to submit panel proposals or any suggestion to the conference chair, Joze Gricar, Professor & Director, eCommerce Center, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Maribor,
Gricar@FOV.Uni-Mb.si, http://eCom.FOV.Uni-Mb.si/Gricar

3. ICE 2005 conference – Integration of products, services and organizations

Academic rigor has been strengthened by this year’s introduction of full paper double blind peer review for the forty-eight academic papers presented in the scientific paper sessions on the first day.

• Engineering Management
• Collaborative Engineering
• Product Development
• Virtual Enterprise

A further step is this year’s launch of a corporate partner program which is supported by AREL, Bosch, EADS, and Siemens to complement strong backing from the academic community with practical relevance. Rolf Buetje, Vice- President, head of EADS’ corporate research centre and Armin Hoffacker, manager at BOSCH’s corporate sector research and advanced engineering emphasized the industrial relevance of innovation methods and the contribution of the ICE community in their development.

• W1 Virtual Enterprises in Aeronautics
• W2 Legal issues in the IST and Collaborative Environment
• W3 Distributed technology infrastructures for CE
• W4 Ambient or mobile collaborative working environment
• W5 Collaborative business network

4. News

5. Events

Note: as a registered user of VE-Forum you can suggest items to be included in subsequent newsletters by submitting news and event items directly in the “News & Events” section of VE-Forum (http://www.ve-forum.org). We would like to thank all the members for their useful contributions, which help us to deliver an interesting and comprehensive newsletter.
 
Best wishes,
 
Simona Barresi, Hermann Loeh, Olivier Rerolle, and Bernhard Katzy