BPM 2019 has initiated a program for Mini-Sabbaticals. The program is offered as an opportunity to extend your stay in Austria in order to build your research contacts network, collaborate, and potentially also arrange future sabbatical visits. The extended BPM community in Austria is large and offers a diverse set of strengths, often supported by world-class facilities and large groups of staff and students. The duration of the visit is up to you and so are the activities you wish to undertake such as guest presentations, working with PhD students, developing joint papers etc. There is no financial support for the mini-sabbatical program. An invitation letter can be provided for visa or approval purposes, if required, by the hosting institution once a visit has been confirmed.

The table below provides an overview of the universities contributing to this initiative. All of these institutions are excited about welcoming you in Austria. If you are interested in collaborating with any of the researchers at these universities then please reach out to them directly.

Vienna University of Economics and Business is the EU’s largest educational institution for business and economics, business law, and social sciences with over 24,000 students. The Institute for Information Business (http://www.wu.ac.at/infobiz) belongs to the Department of Information Systems and Operations and conducts research on novel concepts, models, and techniques leading to business and technology-driven innovations. The research group specifically focuses on data management, knowledge management and business process management. The group has over 30 research staff members and manages several projects funded by, among others, EU FP7, Horizon-2020, FFG, Erasmus+, and FWF.
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At the University of Vienna, the Workflow Systems and Technology (WST) Group headed by Stefanie Rinderle-Ma addresses several aspects in business process technology, ranging from distributed and collaborative processes and their execution to business process compliance and business process intelligence. The WST group is working in different application domains such as smart manufacturing (collaboration with the Austrian Center of Digital Production), security (collaboration with Secure Business Austria), and the tourism domain (collaboration with LuxActive). If you are interested in the overlap of SW engineering, service engineering and business processes, the Software Architecture (SWA) Research Group headed by Uwe Zdun is another option for a mini-sabbatical at University of Vienna.
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The Business Informatics Group (BIG, https://www.big.tuwien.ac.at) is a research division in the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien. Given its name, the division focuses on business informatics that integrates theory and methods of information systems and computer science. In particular, BIG works on those information technology aspects that have a significant effect on the way organizations do their business. Thereby, BIG addresses the gap between the business strategy on why/what to do and the information technology aspect on how to do it in the digital age. The current research areas of BIG cover model-driven engineering, data engineering, process engineering, enterprise engineering, and industrial engineering.
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The Johannes Kepler University Linz (https://www.jku.at/en) has a long-standing tradition for research in the field of business informatics and information systems. Its four institutes of business informatics (http://stukowin.jku.at/institute) cover a broad field of research, addressing (socio-)technical as well as business aspects of information system use in organizations. Embedded in a dynamically developing research environment with strong ties to local industry, the more than 30 researchers of the business informatics institutes adopt a strongly engineering-oriented approach to both fundamental and applied research questions. Current research topics in the field of BPM cover process elicitation and alignment, process modeling and validation techniques, data-driven BPM and strategic BPM.
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