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.