Prof. Manfred Reichert is program committee co-chair of the 2nd Int'l Workshop on Variability Support in Information Systems (VarIS 2014), which will be held in conjunction with the 26th Int'l Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2014). VarIS 2014 will take place in Thessaliniki, Greece at 16 June 2014. Manfred shares this task with his colleagues  Victoria Torres (Universidad Politécnica de Valenica, Spain) and Félix García (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain).

About the Workshop

Contemporary off-the-shelf enterprise information systems (IS) do not provide the flexibility required by agile enterprises whose businesses need to be rapidly adapted in response to market or environmental changes. Usually, standardized IS are deployed in different companies acting in different domains and distributed over various countries not taking their inherent differences into account. Despite these differences, certain IS functionality is shared among enterprises (e.g., the invoice checking and approval process or the customer entity). While major progress has been achieved by shifting from function- to process-centric system design, currently, the construction of IS dealing with all these particularities and commonalities is far from being realized. A feasible direction to improve this situa-tion is to address IS variability as a first class aspect during IS development.

Variability management is prevalent in a multitude of research fields including, for example, requirements engineering, software product lines, business and soft-ware process modeling, and product data management. However, a comprehensive approach dealing with variability in the context of IS engineering and IS management is still missing; e.g., it is not well understood how varying requirements contribute to variability of the different artifacts emerging in the IS lifecycle (e.g., architectural specifications, process models, test cases, handbooks).

The VarIS workshop will fill this gap by bringing together researchers and practitioners from different fields (e.g., requirements engineering, software pro-duct line engineering, business process management, software engineering, pro-duct data management) who need to deal with variability issues in IS not from an isolated point of view, but as an integrated part of a development project. The overall goal of the workshop is to look at variability issues in a wider perspective, trying to understand not just the techniques and languages that allow capturing and representing IS variability, but also to understand IS variability including, for example, its drivers and economic implications. VarIS will discuss the current state of ongoing research, industry needs, future trends, and practical experiences.

Further details and the call for papers can be found on the workshop's webseite.