A Study on the Impact of the Level of Participation in Enterprise Modeling

Participatory enterprise modeling (PEM) is presumed to have a positive impact on commitment, ownership feelings and further appraisals by domain experts with respect to the model. Whether PEM actually produces the desired effects, however, has been little studied. In this paper we report on an investigation of the effects of three different participatory settings: an overall model was created 1) from four individual interviews, 2) from four individual models, or 3) in a joint meeting of domain and modeling experts. The results show that the non-participatory interview setting led to less favorable appraisals, e.g., the level of participation was perceived as lower and the contribution of the modeling experts was perceived as higher. Our findings should help practitioners in weighing possible benefits of participatory enterprise modeling against the organizational and monetary effort it involves.