Bart-Jan van Putten

The Relation Between Dynamic Business Models and Business Cases

This paper analyses the relation between two well-known business concepts. It clarifies how business models, as an implementation of a company’s strategy, can be aligned with business cases, as an abstraction of a company’s operations. The relations are analyzed from a static as well as a dynamic point of view by means of inductive reasoning and literature review. Based on the understanding of the relations, a continuous business model-business case alignment approach is proposed. Further, managerial guidelines are presented supporting the approach. Finally, two software tools, business case framework and business model composer, are presented indicating how the proposed conceptual alignment could be implemented. This paper contributes to research and practice. Both can benefit from the conceptual relation between two well-known concepts that have hardly been linked so far. Practitioners can apply the proposed alignment approach and the managerial guidelines to review their business. For research, we contribute to the body of knowledge of business model concepts. Researchers can build upon this fruitful ground by validating the proposed concept in empirical settings or by implementing software solutions supporting this approach. Consequently, the agility of companies can be increased when implementing merged or changed business models in the organization and when using business cases to determine if it is time to change the business model.

OperA and Brahms: A Symphony?

The organizational view on work systems focuses on the desired outcomes of work (i.e., the work process) while the emergent view focuses on how the work actually gets done (i.e., the work practice). Often a gap exists between these two, because workers pursue individual objectives in addition to the organizational objectives. Agent-based modeling and simulation can be used to improve work systems and thereby organizational performance. Current modeling and simulation frameworks only represent either one of the two views. In order to model both views, we propose an integration of two modeling and simulation frameworks, OperA and Brahms. Using the integrated model, we are able to run simulations that show to what degree work practice differs from work processes.

Challenges in Business Case Development and Requirements for Business Case Frameworks

Business cases (BC) are often used to support information systems (IS) investment evaluation. Unfortunately, business case development (BCD) is a complex task, especially identifying and quantifying the benefits of a proposed investment. Although today’s business case frameworks (BCF) support BCD to some extent, they have several limitations

Business Case Framework

Today’s business case frameworks (BCF) are either too generic, providing too little support for domain-specific business case development (BCD), or are sufficiently specific but not based on a generic BCD process. Such BCF do not allow for reuse of investment criteria or quantification methods, which hampers the broader applicability of those BCF and limits benchmarking and learning.

Business Case Ontology

Today’s BCFs are not based on a standardized model of what a BC is. As a consequence, most BCFs and BCs are structured rather differently. This hampers the broader applicability of those BCFs and limits benchmarking.

Reuse in Business Case Development: Arguments, Challenges and Guidelines

Reusing evaluation criteria and valuation methods is a promising way to make it easier to develop reliable business cases for IS investments. Better support for reuse can support the comparison and prioritization of business cases, can make it easier for decision makers to understand them and it can facilitate learning.

Exploring the Usability of Valuation Methods in Business Cases

Business case development (BCD) is a complex activity, which can be improved by supporting the reuse of investment criteria (benefits, costs, risks) and valuation methods. The aim of this paper was to find out why certain methods are more likely to be reused than others, from the perspective of usability..

Supporting Dynamic Reuse in Business Case Development

Business case development (BCD) is a complex activity, which can potentially be improved by supporting the reuse of investment criteria and valuation methods. The goal of this research was to improve the usefulness and usability of business case frameworks (BCFs), while limiting the effort required to develop and maintain static databases of reusable components.

An Ontology for Traffic Flow Management (ALTERNATE PAPER)

Traffic Flow Management (TFM) is a complex field that involves a variety of participants, terminology, concepts, actions, and relationships. We are in the process of building an agent-based simulation of a proposed concept of Collaborative Traffic Flow Management (CTFM), and found that informal representations were not adequate, given the complexity of the domain. Our solution was to construct an ontology of TFM, which is a formal knowledge structure that encodes information about a particular domain of interest. We describe our development and use of this ontology, and present lessons learned and other potential applications.