An Enterprise Information System must be pertinent for the human and enterprise activities. It plays a central role because most of the activities are now supported by an information system (IS) and also because any Enterprise development process is depending on IS development in most cases. Enterprise and IS developments are completely interwoven. It appears necessary to have concepts and rules, which are pertinent to explain difficulties and potentialities of IS thanks to information technologies. IS domain establishes a rendezvous between a lot of various competencies and responsibilities. The classical software engineering domain, which has not the same objectives, does not provide adequate concepts and rules to the IS engineering domain. With the point of view of this paper, IS engineering appears as a generalisation of the software engineering domain.
M. Michel LEONARD is Full Professor of the University of Geneva since 1977 in the Information System domain. He is the Head of the IS department of this University. His main interest is the analysis of converging aspects between the conceptual models, the Information and Communication technology world and the activities world inside the IS field. With his research team he developed several DBMSs with advanced features such as dynamic specialization, hyperclasses, complete flexibility of the database schema. Presently he manages a research team to develop the Open Source M7 environment to support an evolutionary IS approach, management and implementation of Information System components, fragments of IS methods, knowledge management. He is the author of the book “Database design theory” (MACMILLAN 1992). He is member of the CAISE committee, the IFIP TC8 Working Group, the ICEIS committee, the INTEROP governing committee. He was the general chairman of the last Object-Oriented Information System conference (Geneva, September 2003). He is the co-general chairman of the first INTEROP-ESA conference (Geneva, February 23rd, 24th, 25th, 2004).
Prof. Michel Leonard When: Friday, 15th October 2004, 14:00 (s.t) Where: HS 1 - University Klagenfurt