Eric-Oluf Svee

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.

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.

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.

Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples’ behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practices.

Time geography rediscovered: a common language for location-oriented services

We propose that the concepts of Time Geography be evaluated as a framework for use within location-oriented services. Originally conceived as a system to describe patterns in human migration, Time Geography is ideally suited for providing the common language and concepts necessary for dialogue within this evolving area. Location-oriented services have been the focus of a great deal of attention, but with research occurring in many disparate disciplines, the lack of a common model that can conceptualize these ideas has not received appropriate attention. To demonstrate its applicability within location-oriented services, we present a research activity which makes explicit use of concepts from Time Geography, with the hope that it can be seen as a tractable and practical solution for several difficulties facing this fast growing area of interest.

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.

A model-based approach for capturing consumer preferences from crowdsources: The case of Twitter

Consumer choices are enormously influential in the success of the companies and organizations behind the highly competitive global service and product offerings of today. Consumer choice relates to preference, i.e. a set of assumptions a person creates around a service or a product such as convenience, utility or aesthetics. Furthermore, consumer preferences allow ranking of different assumptions about products or services based on the expected or to-be-experienced satisfaction of consuming them. In our previous work, we proposed a conceptualization of consumer preferences - the Consumer Preference Meta-Model (CPMM) - to enable a classification and ranking of the preferences that would be the basis for deciding which of would be considered to be developed into supporting information systems/services. In this study we collect consumer preferences through crowdsourcing, and in particular Twitter, because of its increasing popularity as a source of up-to-date comments and information about current services and products. The tweets of four major American airlines were processed using different techniques from natural language processing (NLP) that enabled the classification of their objectives, content, and importance within CPMM. By next mapping the highest-ranked results from CPMM to goal models enabled a model-based linkage from a corpus of preferences contained within short texts to high-level requirements for system/services.

Extending Enterprise Architectures to Capture Consumer Values: The Case of TOGAF

This paper explores how to make Enterprise Architecture (EA) aware of consumer values. Current proposals in enterprise modeling recognize the need for user needs, although often without taking explicit account of the consumer values that are at the root of the exchange process. Enterprise architecture provides a roadmap for the development of systems that can support the creation and delivery of products of interest. First, a survey of enterprise architecture practitioners highlights the importance and significance of integrating consumer values into enterprise architecture through. Next, the survey results are used to enhance a consumer value meta-model for better integration with enterprise architecture, specifically The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).

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.

Case-Based Development of Consumer Preferences Using Brand Personality and Values Co-creation

Consumers have preferences whose determination is outside the realm of economic rules and values. To be successful in current market conditions, product and service companies need to capture such preferences to provide best-fit support by their Information Systems (IS), sometimes by developing entirely new features. In our previous work, we have conceptualized a meta-model for incorporating consumer preferences into the development of IS —Consumer Preference Meta-Model (CPMM). This artifact was developed with the ability to be expanded with new kinds of consumer preferences, as well as their related concepts. Building upon that work, in this study we consider methodological usage of CPMM for the case of Asker’s Brand Personality as the primary value framework. The framework brings both the enterprise and the consumer into dialog, with this values co-creation fostering synchronicity between the information systems that are designed as an outgrowth of this process, and the desires of both the consumers and the businesses that they will support. The case example uses the Twitter feed of a major airline, whose tweets are processed using Aaker’s 5-factors and Kano’s quality framework. The results complete an instantiation of CPMM that generates a feature model reflective of both brand personality and values co-creation.