Supporting the combination and integration of multiple standards and models

There is growing interest in defining best practices that support multiple needs in companies. This has led to the current situation, where organizations, universities and research groups, amongst others, have defined a wide range of reference models. This is also known as the quagmire of standards and models. The ample assortment of possibilities enables companies to choose and implement the models that are most suitable for their particular features. There may even be a reduction in the cost associated with effort and time in their implementation. Each model, however, defines its own process structure, approach, scope, and so forth, so carrying out the implementation of more than two models without guidelines or suitable tools can be a hard, if not impossible, task. With all this in mind, the aim of this paper is to present a harmonization Framework, which establishes the elements and tools needed to support the harmonization of multiple reference models. It also presents a detailed summary of the elements defined, along with a summary of the successful application of the harmonization framework in two case studies. This harmonization framework and its elements have been shown to be suitable for supporting the harmonization of multiple models.