Development of economic and social environment as of today depends in many European countries on strong capabilities to use ICT (ie information and communications technologies and sciences) in proper and well-governed, more specifically professional manner.

One of the leading organizations is the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) (www.ifip.org) has been functioning since over 50 years --under umbrella of United Nations and other world bodies--  and through more then 100 Academic Conferences per year. in this way fulfilling a mission for improving professionalism in creation, development, use and maintenance of ICT for the benefit of the whole of society.

IFIP is a multinational and apolitical organization, a non-governmental and a not-for-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing such as in Belgium by FBVI-FAIB. 

FBVI-FAIB was created 25 years ago with the support of over 15 professional associations working in different domains of interest in ICT. With the sustained support of Belgian Science Poliy Office (BELSPO) more than 50 Belgian academics are actively cooperating with several IFIP TCs (Technical Committees) such as Education and ICT (TC4), Telecommunications (TC6) , Management Information Systems (TC8), Relationship Computers and Society (TC9) and Security and ICT (TC11) and other TCs.

Within its mission of developing support to improve ICT Professionalism, in quantitative and qualitative sense, FBVI-FAIB was willing to join in 2000 as a member society for Belgium with the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) (www.cepis.org). This cooperation has led to contributions from Belgium practitioners and academics in the research on eCompetences in EU-context. A major study on ICT Professionalism & e-Skills was the result of this collaboration. The final report of the e-Skills & ICT Professionalism project to support the development of a European Framework for ICT Professionalism is now available.The report describes the imperative to mature the profession and provides key recommendations and ideas on a roadmap for establishing the ICT Profession in Europe. It is now important to provoke with all member societies a broader debate and action plan to improve knowledge, skills and correct ethical behavior within the communities of all kinds of ICT Professionals through the vehicle of their respective associations they have formed and operated in recent years in several special ICT-domains.

Through this broader actions, all over the different European countries,  to strengthen quality of work done by all  kinds of ICT-Professionals, be it in domains of governing and managing ICT, development of software, operationalising in secure ways ICT infrastructure, it is within the mission of FBVI-FAIB to help improving value and benefit of ICT for our Belgian and European society.

Prof. em. Dirk Deschoolmeester

Chairman FBVI-FAIB

Enterprise information systems (EIS) are large-scale modular software systems, such as ERP, that support and integrate process information flows, information reporting and business analytics within and between complex organizations. They provide a technology platform that enables organizations to integrate their information assets and coordinate their business processes. As the central nervous system of the organization, they ensure that information can be shared across all functional departments and managerial levels. EIS are invaluable because they eliminate the problem of information fragmentation caused by multiple information systems in an organization.
The CONFENIS series of conferences offers an annual opportunity to EIS researchers and practitioners to present recent research or application experiences, to provide feedback to peers, to set out the vision for future research and developments in the field, and to create or confirm long-lasting and fruitful collaborations.
With the theme of CONFENIS 2012 we wish to emphasize two evolutions in the science and practice of EIS. The first evolution is the development of more open systems, for instance, the creation of interoperation between systems from collaborating organizations or the composition of systems from standard modules and packages offered by different vendors. The second evolution is the move towards more flexible systems, meaning easily configurable and adaptable systems based on service-oriented software architectures, the software as a service business model, cloud computing infrastructures, and software product line approaches. We therefore especially welcome Design Science research and technical or evaluation papers on methods, techniques and technologies to make EIS more transparent, e.g. research on enterprise modelling, ontology and architecture that would ‘open up’ the structure and behaviour of enterprise systems, as well as empirically-driven research and theoretical, conceptual or even visionary papers on how flexible EIS solutions can foster business agility and innovation.

We invite you to an extremely exciting event in Amsterdam. The IFIP World Computer Congress 2012 will address an issue that is of interest to all of you and of great importance to our society.

T is Cool is an initiative of Saskia Van Uffelen CEO of  Bull Belux. Saskia wanted to give IT a cool image by showing younger people that IT offers a nice work environment with a lot of opportunities and that IT can help to make our world a better place. Jonas, the son of Saskia told his mother that he would never study IT, because for him IT is something for nerds wearing funny glasses and sitting all day and night in the basement working behind a computer screen. Saskia did not agree at all and launched her website 'IT is Cool'.



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