A dramatic paradigm shift has been witnessed since the 1980s in scientific and business information management: from isolation to full connectivity, from intuition to rules, from local to global, from facts to data/knowledge and from profit driven to customer service focused. Information infrastructure is now a critical communication media for modern enterprises and scientific organisations. It determines the ability of an enterprise to respond to new opportunities and threats, and often sets mechanisms that redefine the market and company's competitive advantage. A modern enterprise information system (EIS) is a complex system. It consists of sub-systems to acquire, store, process and distribute information, to model, enforce and monitor scientific analytical processes and business processes, and to map user requirements to integrated technological solutions. However, an elegant solution to one sub-system does not automatically lead to a better overall EIS. Those sub-systems are tightly coupled and integrated so that a change to one impacts on another. Researchers working on various aspects of EIS must collaborate more closely, realising implications, potentials, challenges and new opportunities, to form a critical intellectual mass to work towards achieving a common goal - a highly effective, coherent, flexible, reliable and future-proof EIS. Only close collaborative arrangements between experts from complementary domains supported by a proper research management offer a practical approach with a good potential. EII Research Network focuses our research effort on common, fundamental issues which can be found in emerging applications, such as enterprise information systems, supply chain management, customer relation management, enterprise resources planning, financial data analysis, e-Health, e-Education, e-Science, web services, bioinformatics, environmental information systems and location-based services. These common issues include:

• management of very large amount of dynamic and complex data, and discovery of new knowledge from the data;

• utilisation in a cost-effective, reliable and convenient way of massive storage and computing power untapped in an organisation or a community;

• integration and interoperability issues among different application systems and among different organisations and communities; user interface, visualisation and usability issues for new technologies; and

• security, privacy, and quality issues of information sharing

The extent of the research in this area is definitely beyond a single project. This ARC initiative is a unique Australian opportunity to bring the best researchers in different aspects of EIS to make a substantial impact on this most important contemporary ICT goal - providing scalable solutions for globally deployable Enterprise Computing Environments.