These are the proceedings of the Third IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling, held in Delft (The Netherlands) on November 9 and 10, 2010. It followed the success of PoEM 2008 and 2009 (both held in Stockholm), which each attracted over 50 participants from all over the world, representing both industry and academia. This indicates that enterprise modeling (EM) has gained popularity both in the academic community and among practitioners.

The interactive format of the previous conferences sparked constructive interaction between research and practice. PoEM 2010 further strengthened this interaction.

The PoEM conferences contribute to establishing a dedicated forum where the use of EM in practice is addressed by bringing together researchers, users and practitioners. The main focus of PoEM is EM methods, approaches, and tools, and how they are used in practice. The goal of the conference was to further a better understanding of the practice of EM and improve the theory behind the practice, contributing to improved EM practice and to the sharing of knowledge.

For this third edition, the founders of PoEM, Anne Persson and Janis Stirna, passed the torch for the first time; we hope we lived up to the high standards set by them and thank them for their initiative, commitment, and excellent work.

PoEM will return to Scandinavia next year, and will remain to do so every other year. The 17 high-quality papers (out of 44 submissions) presented at PoEM 2010 display a welcome diversity in topics while being duly centered around the enterprise modeling theme. A number of submissions reflected the trend for both practitioners and academics to look into domains and conceptualizations that are more and more distant from those that are the focus in traditional information systems engineering, addressing a continuation of the move towards dedicated and far reaching “business-orientation.” Also, we observe that the field is slowly but surely maturing, as indicated by an increase in detail and specialization of the contributions.

In its 2010 edition, PoEM saw relatively few submissions concerning enterprise architecture. It is very likely this is because this year PoEM was co-located with two other events: the Practice-Driven Research in Enterprise Transformations (PRET 2010) working conference, and the Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR 2010) workshop. Proceedings of both events also appear in the Springer LNBIP series. The three events together constituted Enterprise Engineering Week, with Erik Proper at the helm.