Frugal Decision Heuristics in Enterprise Design: Are Reference Models Cognitively Ergonomic?

Reference models are applied as a form of control exerted by organizations in order to meet various goals such as shared understanding and/or semantic interoperability. The underlying assumption is that by reusing such conceptual reference models the development of the solution artifacts can be executed in a better way with regard to efficiency and effectiveness. However, human decision making may follow much simpler rule-based heuristics, rather than computing all given features (in a given model), impairing the assumed benefit of reference models as being used in the predominant grammars. We explore the frugality of the design decision process under reuse in a first experiment. The preliminary results show tendencies that the reference models´ grammars indeed may be of limited aid in model learning and design, however, due to the small sample size the hypothesis should be examined in a larger factorial experiment in subsequent research activities.