Using Reference Models for Business Engineering - State-of-the-Art and Future Developments

Conceptual models play an increasingly important role in all phases of the information systems life cycle. For instance, they are used for business process engineering, information systems development, and customizing of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Despite conceptual modeling being a vital instrument for developing information systems, the modeling process often is resource-consuming and faulty. As a way to overcome these failures and to improve the development of enterprise-specific models, the concept of reference modeling has been introduced. A reference model is a conceptual framework and may be used as a blueprint for information systems development. In this paper, we describe how to use reference models for business engineering. Our discussion is based on a well-known framework for research on reference modeling that consists of four elements: reference modeling languages, reference modeling methods, reference models, and reference modeling context. Each element of the framework is discussed with respect to prior research and future research opportunities