Designing Services as Adaptable Reference Models

Reference models are focal research objects in the Information Systems discipline. The overall goal of reference modeling in IS research is to capture and publish knowledge on how to design and structure artifacts, e.g., information systems or business processes (Becker et al., 2004). The technique of reference modeling has been adopted by companies in many industries (e.g., Software, Health, Banking) to denote good practices for designing business processes or application systems (Fettke/Loos, 2004; Becker et al., 2002). While extant research predominantly focuses on constructing reference models for industries (Becker/Schütte, 2004; Neumann, 2003) and IS domains (Ahlemann/Riempp, 2008), in this chapter we explore the benefits of constructing services as reference models