Inductive reference model development: recent results and current challenges

Reference modeling offers attractive bene®ts for both research and practice. The inductive strategy for reference model development derives reference models by generalizing individual enterprise models. It has recently gained attention in research, however, its practical application still faces numerous challenges. The objective of the article at hand is to identify recent contributions to the ®eld of inductive reference model development and use them to analyze the current challenges that impede the application of their results in practice. We identify a total of 18 contributions, either scienti®c articles describing inductive methods for reference model development, or practical reports describing the concrete development of a reference model for a certain domain. They are all analyzed by means of a six-stage-framework for reference model development. For each stage, we derive speci®c challenges and point out acknowledgments and potential solutions.