On the Syntax of Reference Model Configuration - Transforming the C-EPC into Lawful EPC Models

Enterprise Systems need to be configured to fit organizational requirements and to provide support for their business operations. Reference models aim at supporting this task but fail in providing adequate conceptual support due to missing configurability of the models themselves. Our research extends the work on a configurable reference modeling approach. In previous research we developed a conceptual notation for configurable reference models. This paper considers a syntactic perspective of reference model configuration. We discuss the lawful environments of configurable nodes and report about syntactic implications of model configuration in these environments. We then apply these findings in the design of an interchange format for configurable reference models and discuss its applicability for the XML-based design of tool support, which ultimately will facilitate the automatic verification and transformation of reference process models to executable workflow specifications. 1 Reference Models and Enterprise Systems Many organizations suffer problems from poorly implemented Enterprise Systems (ES) [1]. Both academia and industry state that these problems result from a misalignment gap between business and IT, which, once closed, would lead to significantly improved business performance [2]. The notion of (mis-) alignment primarily embraces the process dimension, i.e. the alignment of IT functionality to the actual business processes of an organization. In many cases, it is observed that the system hampers the normal way of handling processes instead of supporting it. This is even more surprising given the fact that business process orientation as a concept has been a major topic in both academia and practice at least since the 1990’s [3, 4]. Alongside this trend, the IS community