Context-based modeling: introducing a novel modeling approach

Abstract

Despite the fact that researchers agree on the importance of enterprise models to an organization's success, the knowledge about how to handle problems where models have to be compared or integrated is still fuzzy and vague, and there is little agreement regarding compositional facets. Highly interesting is the interaction between models in shared modeling projects – e. g. between requirement models and service implementations in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This article highlights an approach that allows to prevent integration conflicts in conceptual models already during the modeling phase. The influence of this approach on conceptual modeling and its use in intra-organizational collaborations is investigated. We show the inherent complexities of model-mediated interactions between domain experts and IT-service developers. It is suggested that at an early stage of the modeling process the use of guidelines has an substantial benefit for avoiding integration conflicts in conceptual models. Furthermore, due to the way how the approach bridges the semantic gap, changes of business requirements as well as technical implementation restrictions influence each other. This results in an ongoing system development process that can be interpreted as a permanent management of application systems. Our results contribute to model-based management theories that have so far neglected the distributed construction of conceptual models.