Concepts for Comparison in Models to Support Decision Making.

The cognitive basis of any decision making process is a comparison. This paper presents evidence from two distinct cases showing that decision making is facilitated by selecting specific sets of business concepts for comparison. The first case illustrates modelling of a new business process that does not exist yet. In this case, the concept for comparison is found outside the modelled business system. The second case presents an improvement of an existing business process, where the concepts for comparison are found inside the model of the existing system and compared with the concepts used in the model of the modified system. These cases identify two ways of selecting concepts for comparison that help to make the key decision to implement or not implement a proposed system model.