Assessing Enterprise Modeling Languages Using a Generic Quality Framework

Abstract

Statoil, one of Norway’s largest organizations, recently wanted to standardize an enterprise modeling language for process modeling for sense-making and communication. To perform the evaluation, a generic framework for assessing the quality of models and modeling languages was specialized to the needs of the company. Five different modeling languages were evaluated according to the specialized criteria. Two languages were, through this, found as candidate languages, and further criteria related to tool and process support for using the languages in actual modeling were used to decide the language to choose for future standardization. This work illustrates the practical utility of the overall framework, where language quality features are looked upon as means to enable the creation of models of high quality. It also illustrates the need for specializing this kind of general framework based on the requirements of the specific organization.