Constantinos Giannoulis

Modeling business strategy: A meta-model of strategy maps and balanced scorecards

Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategys execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy and goal oriented requirements engineering. The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model for Strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards. The validity of the meta-model is tested through a case scenario using OWL and Telos.

Modeling Business Strategy: A Consumer Value Perspective

Business strategy lays out the plan of an enterprise to achieve its vision by providing value to its customers. Typically, business strategy focuses on economic value and its relevant exchanges with customers and does not directly address consumer values. However, consumer values drive customers’ choices and decisions to use a product or service, and therefore should have a direct impact on business strategy. This paper explores whether and how consumer values influence business strategy, and how they might be linked to IS solutions that support the implementation of such strategies. To address these questions, the study maps consumer values to a business strategy approach via a meta-model commonly used for such purposes, based on strategy maps and balanced scorecards (SMBSC). Additionally, the applicability of the mappings is illustrated via a case scenario where the mappings are applied and the business strategy conceptualization captures them. Finally, based on these mappings, high level guidelines for linking consumer values to requirements for the development of IS solutions through business strategy conceptualization are proposed.

Model-Driven Strategic Awareness: From a Unified Business Strategy Meta-Model (UBSMM) to Enterprise Architecture

Business strategy should be well understood in order to support an enterprise to achieve its vision and to define an architecture supporting that vision. While business views are identified in many Enterprise Architecture (EA) proposals, business strategy formulations from the area of Strategic Management are overlooked. Thus, IT solutions cannot be traced back to business strategy in a clear and unambiguous way. Our intended proposal, a Unified Business Strategy Meta-Model (UBSMM), aims at establishing such a link. UBSMM is a formalization of the integration of known business strategy formulations with precise semantics enabling its model-level usage to provide strategic awareness to Enterprise Architecture. In this paper we present the development process of UBSMM, and further, we propose conceptual relationships towards Enterprise Architecture (EA).

Consumer Value-Aware Enterprise Architecture

To improve the alignment between business and IT, this paper explores how to make Enterprise Architecture (EA) aware of consumer values. Current proposals in enterprise modeling recognize the need for modeling user needs, or values. However they do not classify them nor do they provide means to obtain them. In our study, these are first introduced as basic values captured via Schwartz’s Value Survey, a cross-culturally applicable tool from the world of psychology, which are mapped onto Holbrook’s Typology of Consumer Values. Additionally, because formal models require inputs that are more concrete than abstract, and through this proposal, the indistinct values of consumers can be transformed and formalized to be incorporated into enterprise architecture, represented here by ISO/IEC 42010. The novelty of this work is found in the method for operationalizing consumer values for their alignment and utilization within information systems.

Modeling Competition-Driven Business Strategy for Business IT Alignment

Business strategy aims at supporting the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategy’s execution. Aligning business strategy to system requirements requires explicit models from both business strategy and requirements engineering. However, existing business strategy definition approaches are informal and their syntax is based on natural language, therefore, they cannot be used in model-driven alignment. An objective of our research is to define a well-structured business strategy modeling language. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model based on Porter’s work on competition driven strategy and its extension by Stabell and Fjeldstad. Our UML meta-model is formalized in Telos and OWL. An initial validation is performed by instantiating the meta-model using a case scenario.

Towards a Unified Business Strategy Language: A Meta-model of Strategy Maps

Alignment between business strategies and the resources engaged ensuring their realization, has been a continuous concern of enterprises of all kinds in last few decades. Commonly, enterprises fail to establish the traceability from business strategies towards operational tasks carried by employees. From the requirements engineering perspective this problem leads also to a misalignment between business and IT assets. In this study, we argue that for communicating high-level intentions and strategies down to the operational perspective, i.e. tasks and resources, the core necessity is to have a rich and well-defined language for modeling business strategies. Such a language could be further utilized for facilitating formalizations and a constructive analysis of high-level business aspects of enterprises, as well for comparing and unifying existing intentional modeling languages from the business and requirements engineering domains. As a reference proposal for formalizing business strategies, we consider the well-established strategy maps [1] from the Management Information Systems community which provide textual concepts of strategy-related notions establishing causal relationships between them. We have set an effort to formalize strategy maps in the form of a meta-model, usage scenarios and constraints, providing a systematic basis for obtaining a unified language/ontology for business strategy modeling.

Capturing consumer preferences as requirements for software product lines

Abstract Delivering great consumer experiences in competitive market conditions requires software vendors to move away from traditional modes of thinking to an outside-in perspective, one that shifts their business to becoming consumer-centric. Requirements engineers operating in these conditions thus need new means to both capture real preferences of consumers and then relate them to requirements for software customized in different ways to fit anyone. Additionally, because system development models require inputs that are more concrete than abstract, the indistinct values of consumers need to be classified and formalized. To address this challenge, this study aims to establish a conceptual link between preferences of consumers and system requirements, using software product line (SPL) as a means for systematically accommodating the variations within the preferences. The novelty of this study is a conceptual model of consumer preference, which integrates generic value frameworks from both psychology and marketing, and a method for its transformation to requirements for SPL using a goal-oriented RE framework as the mediator. The presented artifacts are grounded in an empirical study related to the development of a system for online education.

Towards Consumer Preference-Aware Requirements

From the business perspective, one of the core concerns within Business-IT alignment is coordinating strategic initiatives and plans with Information Systems (IS). However, while substantial work has been done on linking strategy to requirements for IS development, it has usually been focused on the core value exchanges offered by the business, overlooking other aspects influencing the implementation of strategy. One of these, consumer preferences, has been proven to influence the successful provisioning of the business’s customer value proposition, and this study aims to establish a conceptual link between them and system requirements. The core contention is that reflecting consumer preferences through business strategy in system requirements allows for the development of systems aligned to consumer preferences, and therefore systems that better support a consumer orientation, where the reasoning behind a particular solution stems from them. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a consumer preference meta-model along with an illustration of its relationship to a requirements’ technique (i*) through the Strategy Maps business strategy formulation.

Model-Centric Strategy-IT Alignment: An Empirical Study in Progress

IT pervades all sectors of today’s organizations. To support efficient business solutions, business-IT alignment has been long-time discussed as a solution. Given the complexity of achieving alignment, in our research we have hypothesized the importance of one partial possible solution, namely, the fit between strategy and information system requirements. To systematically investigate the influence of widely-used business strategy formulations, such as Porter’s Value Chain, Kaplan & Norton’s Strategy Maps, and others, we propose a model-centric approach to strategy-IT alignment where the strategy formulations are represented in the form of models, and mapped to requirements models. The objective of this paper is to present a pilot empirical investigation assessing if strategy-IT alignment is an issue of concern, and seeking to obtain insights from practitioners about relevance of our model-based view for strategy-IT alignment. The empirical information is collected through a well-prepared questionnaire-based survey.

Capturing Consumer Preference in System Requirements Through Business Strategy

A core concern within Business-IT alignment is coordinating strategic initiatives and plans with Information Systems IS. Substantial work has been done on linking strategy to requirements for IS development, but it has usually been focused on the core value exchanges offered by the business, and thus overlooking other aspects that influence the implementation of strategy. One of these, consumer preferences, has been proven to influence the successful provisioning of the businesss customer value proposition, and this study aims to establish a conceptual link between both strategy and consumer preferences to system requirements. The core contention is that reflecting consumer preferences through business strategy in system requirements allows for the development of aligned systems, and therefore systems that better support a consumer orientation. The contribution of this paper is an approach to establish such alignment, with this being accomplished through the proposal of a consumer preference meta-model mapped to a business strategy meta-model further linked to a system requirements technique. The validity of this proposal is demonstrated through a case study carried out within an institution of higher education in Sweden.