Reference Modeling for Higher Education Budgeting: Applying the H2 Toolset for Conceptual Modeling of Performance-Based Funding Systems

vom Brocke J; Buddendick C; Simons A

Abstract
The Higher Education (HE) sector has gained remarkable economic importance worldwide. There is a huge amount of institutions competing in this dynamically evolving market. Emerging concepts like new public management advise to organize HE institutions as autonomous business units that can easily be adapted to market changes. In this context, methods of performance-based funding play an important role in governing the institutions both from an external and internal perspective. However, the right choice of indicators measuring the performance turns out to be a vital factor for the success of these budgeting methods. Wrongly chosen, they may even be misleading. Whereas most studies in this field suggest particular measurement systems, our focus of research is to provide a methodology for the design of individual measurement systems. As part of this method, techniques from reference modeling can be applied in order to reuse typical measures for special situations and then further adopt and extend them. In this paper, we study the modeling language H2 which may serve as an essential part of such a methodology. We conclude with an outlook on further research.

Keywords
Budgeting; H2; Higher Education (HE); Incentive System; Indicator System; Information Model; Performance-Based Funding; Reference Modeling