Designing infrastructures for reusing conceptional models – a general framework and its application for collaborative reference modelling

Abstract

Reference modelling offers numerous potentials for business engineering. These potentials lie essentially in providing means for reusing knowledge about the design of business processes considering both the potentials of application systems and business needs. However, reference modelling is as yet a rather young field of research and hardly ready for widespread operational use in business engineering praxis. Preliminary work focusing on the methodological aspects of model design may in particular be insufficient in supporting business engineers properly. The article at hand addresses this problem from a pragmatic perspective focussing on the designers` needs in specific modelling situations. Our work has revealed that comprehensive infrastructures are needed which provide various kinds of design support. Apart from methodological contributions, it is especially work in the fields of organisational and technological infrastructure design that is needed. In order to illustrate and evaluate the approach, we will present a study which applies the findings for the set-up of an infrastructure which makes use of collaborative techniques. The infrastructure is presented with respect to each building block including the presentation of a prototype. The pragmatic approach thus, gives way to collaborative reference modelling. This appears promising for making use of reference modelling in business engineering.