The Mother of All HERM Mappings: Sector-wide Insight of Impact Changes and Common Services

9 pages•Published: June 18, 2026

Abstract

Higher Education Reference Models (HERM) provide a structured, sector-specific framework for describing business capabilities, conceptual data domains, application components and technology services in higher education. This paper formalises the ‘Mother of All HERM Mappings’ (MoHM) approach, which enables institutions and national bodies to analyze how external drivers — legislation, shared services, and technology trends — affect Higher Education Institute operation, information and IT systems. In addition, the approach includes extensions of the HERM model by national reference architectures and vocabularies. We synthesise current HERM governance, outline a reproducible multi-level mapping method, and report findings from early pilots. The approach supports interoperability, transparency and evidence‑informed decision making across European, national and institutional contexts (CAUDIT, 2026; EDUCAUSE, 2025).

Keyphrases: business capability model (brm), digital transformation, enterprise architecture (ea), evidence informed decision making, higher education reference models (herm), interoperability, mother of all herm mappings (mohm), shared governance

In: Laurence Desnos, Carmen Diaz, Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz, Lazaros Merakos, Raimund Vogl, Stuart McLellan and Ulrike Lucke (editors). Proceedings of EUNIS 2026 Annual Congress, vol 109, pages 52-60.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/JqjT
	https://doi.org/10.29007/dkq3

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{EUNIS2026:Mother_All_HERM_Mappings,
  author    = {Esa Suominen and Patrik Maltusch},
  title     = {The Mother of All HERM Mappings: Sector-wide Insight of Impact Changes and Common Services},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of EUNIS 2026 Annual Congress},
  editor    = {Laurence Desnos and Carmen Diaz and Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz and Lazaros Merakos and Raimund Vogl and Stuart McLellan and Ulrike Lucke},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {109},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/JqjT},
  doi       = {10.29007/dkq3},
  pages     = {52-60},
  year      = {2026}}

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