Jaap Gordijn

Value-based requirements engineering: exploring innovative e-commerce ideas

Innovative e-commerce ideas are characterised by commercial products yet unknown to the market, enabled by information technology such as the Internet and technologies on top of it. How to develop such products is hardly known. We propose an interdisciplinary approach, e3-value, to explore an innovative e-commerce idea with the aim of understanding such an idea thoroughly and evaluating it for potential profitability. Our methodology exploits a requirements engineering way of working, but employs concepts and terminology from business science, marketing and axiology. It shows how to model business requirements and improve business–IT alignment, in sophisticated multi-actor value constellations that are common in electronic commerce. In addition to the e3-value approach methodology, we also present the action research-based development of our methodology, by using one of the longitudinal projects we carried out in the field of online news article provisioning.

Designing and evaluating e-business models

This article presents an e-business modeling approach that combines the rigorous approach of IT systems analysis with an economic value perspective from business sciences.

Business Modelling Is Not Process Modelling

Innovative e-business projects start with a design of the e-business model.We often encounter the view, in research as well as industry practice, that an e-business model is similar to a business process model, and so can be specified using UML activity diagrams or Petri nets. In this paper, we explain why this is a misunderstanding. The root cause is that a business model is not about process but about value exchanged between actors. Failure to make this separation of concerns leads to poor business decision-making and inadequate business requirements.

E-service design using i* and e/sup 3/ value modeling

Two requirements engineering techniques, i* and e3 value, work together to explore commercial e-services from a strategic-goal and profitability perspective. We demonstrate our approach using a case study on Internet radio

Towards a reference ontology for business models

Ontologies are viewed as increasingly important tools for structuring domains of interests. In this paper we propose a reference ontology of business models using concepts from three established business model ontologies; the REA, BMO, and e3-value. The basic concepts in the reference ontology concern actors, resources, and the transfer of resources between actors. Most of the concepts in the reference ontology are taken from one of the original ontologies, but we have also introduced a number of additional concepts, primarily related to resource transfers between business actors. The purpose of the proposed ontology is to increase the understanding of the original ontologies as well as the relationships between them, and also to seek opportunities to complement and improve on them.

What's in an Electronic Business Model?

An electronic business model is an important baseline for the development of e-commerce system applications. Essentially, it provides the design rationale for e-commerce systems from the business point of view. However, how an e-business model must be defined and specified is a largely open issue. Business decision makers tend to use the notion in a highly informal way, and usually there is a big gap between the business view and that of IT developers. Nevertheless, we show that conceptual modelling techniques from IT provide very useful tools for precisely pinning down what e-business models actually are, as well as for their structured specification. We therefore present a (lightweight) ontology of what should be in an e-business model. The key idea we propose and develop is that an e-business model ontology centers around the core concept of value, and expresses how value is created, interpreted and exchanged within a multi-party stakeholder network. Our e-business model ontology is part of a wider methodology for e-business modelling, called e3 -value, that is currently under development. It is based on a variety of industrial applications we are involved in, and it is illustrated by discussing a free Internet access service as an example.

Understanding Business Strategies of Networked Value Constellations Using Goal- and Value Modeling

In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. In contrast, we consider the use of GORE for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a cross-organizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. In this paper we investigate the relation between strategic goal- and value modeling. We use theories about business strategy such as those by Porter to identify strategic goals of a value constellation, and operationalize these goals using value models. We show how value modeling allows us to find more detailed goals, and to analyze conflicts among goals

Value based requirements creation for electronic commerce applications

Electronic commerce applications have special features compared to conventional information systems. First, because electronic commerce usually involves yet nonexisting business activities, requirements for e-commerce applications have to be created from scratch rather than elicited. Second, design decisions about e-business models and the associated information systems architecture cannot be sequentially made in a decoupled way, because business and technology considerations are strongly linked. On these counts, current methodology for requirements engineering is inadequate for electronic commerce applications. We outline a structured approach to e-commerce requirements creation. This e/sup 3/-VALUE approach enables one to clarify business model decisions to be made by management, by modelling the end-to-end value activities and exchanges in the e-commerce stakeholder network. In addition, this value network model enables system developers to derive high-level requirements concerning the software architecture.

Using conceptual models to explore business-ICT alignment in networked value constellations

In this paper, we introduce e3alignment for inter-organizational business-ICT alignment. With the e3alignment framework, we create alignment between organizations operating in an agile networked value constellation—which is a set of organizations who jointly satisfy a customer need—by (1) focusing on the interaction between the organizations in the constellation, (2) considering interaction from four different perspectives, and (3) utilizing conceptual modeling techniques to analyze and create alignment within and between the perspectives. By creating inter-organizational business-ICT alignment between the actors in the constellation, e3alignment ultimately contributes to a sustainable and profitable constellation. To actually create alignment, e3alignment iteratively takes three specific steps: (1) identification of alignment issues, (2) solution design, and (3) impact analysis. We illustrate our approach with cases from the Dutch aviation industry, Spanish electricity industry, and Dutch telecom industry.

Value-oriented design of service coordination processes: correctness and trust

The rapid growth of service coordination languages creates a need for methodological support for coordination design. Coordination design differs from workflow design because a coordination process connects different businesses that can each make design decisions independently from the others, and no business is interested in supporting the business processes of others. In multi-business cooperative design, design decisions are only supported by all businesses if they contribute to the profitability of each participating business. So in order to make coordination design decisions supported by all participating businesses, requirements for a coordination process should be derived from the business model that makes the coordination profitable for each participating business. We claim that this business model is essentially a model of intended value exchanges. We model the intended value exchanges of a business model as e3 -value value models and coordination processes as UML activity diagrams. The contribution of the paper is then to propose and discuss a criterion according to which a service coordination process must be correct with respect to a value exchange model. This correctness is necessary to gain business support for the process. Finally, we discuss methodological consequences of this approach for service coordination process design.