Reference Modeling for Organizational Change: Applying Collaborative Techniques for Business Engineering

The orientation on the technical content of a reference model can increase the efficiency of processes in business engineering projects. Despite this, the use of reference models in the field of business engineering has not yet established itself in practice. The article at hand addresses this problem from a pragmatic perspective focusing on the designers‘ needs in specific modeling situations. Our work has revealed that we are in need of comprehensive infrastructures which provide various kinds of design support. Apart from methodological contributions, work in the fields of organizational and technological infrastructure design is needed. In order to illustrate and evaluate our approach, we will present a study which applies the findings for the set-up of an infrastructure that makes use of collaborative techniques. The infrastructure will be presented with respect to each building block, including the presentation of a prototype. This pragmatic approach thus, results in collaborative reference modeling and presents a way of using reference modeling for organizational change.