On October 23, 2012 Stephan Buchwald successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled

”Increasing the Consistency and Flexibility of Process-Oriented Applications Through Service-Orientation”

at the University of Ulm, Germany. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate Stephan on his successful PhD defense and wishes him all the best for his future. Stephan's PhD advisor and PhD promotor has been Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert.

Stephan's PhD thesis targets at increasing the consistency and flexibility of process-oriented applications through service-orientation. A challenge in this context is the large discrepancy existing between the requirements of the business departments on one hand and the process implementations actually provided by the IT department on the other (business-IT alignment gap). In his PhD work, Stephan developed a holistic methodology for realizing flexible, process-oriented applications in a service-oriented architecture. This methodology is based on the consistent definition, management and maintenance of process, service and data artifacts at both the business and the technical level.

Stephan's did his research in the context of the ENPROSO project and was partially funded by Daimler AG.

Members of the PhD committee:

• Prof. Dr. Uwe Schöning (Chairman)
• Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (Promotor and First Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Franz Schweiggert  (Second Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Bauer (External Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam (Core committee member)
• Prof. Dr. Franz Hauck (Core committee member)

Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert congratulates Stephan Buchwald