Modern enterprises are under permanent pressure for change to cope with new competitors and integrate emerging technologies. These changes involve adaptation of processes, operations, architectures, value propositions, and the response to evolving market requirements—especially regarding the digitalization. Modelling methods are an established approach for the conceptual representation, design, analysis, and implementation of complex systems and have gained much attention in both, academia and industry. At the core of a modelling method is the metamodel as a formalized specification of the syntactic nature of the domain under consideration. The paper at hand amplifies the notion of metamodels toward “metamodels as a conceptual structure” and introduces semantic and syntactic operations applied to this structure. Based on recent advances in the field, this paper shows, how metamodels as a conceptual structure facilitate managing complexity in fast changing environments.

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