Tharaka Ilayperuma

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.

On the notion of value object

It is increasingly recognized that business models offer an abstraction that is useful not only in the exploration of new business networks but also for the design and redesign of operational business processes. Among others, they can be used as input for a risk analysis that is crucial in cross-organizational business process design. However, the notion of value object is up till now not clearly defined. In this paper we investigate the notion of value, value objects and the activities involved when transferring value objects between business actors. We illustrate the proposed value object model by applying it on the well-known conference case.

A declarative foundation of process models

In this paper, a declarative foundation for process models is proposed. Three issues in process management and modeling are identified: business orientation, traceability, and flexibility. It is shown how these issues can be addressed by basing process models on business models, where a business model focuses on the transfer of value between agents. As a bridge between business models and process models, the notion of activity dependency model is introduced, which identifies, classifies, and relates activities needed for executing and coordinating value transfers.

Strategic Analysis Using Value Modeling--The c3-Value Approach

E3-value has proven to be a useful modeling technique and method to support the analysis of business models. However, for strategic analysis, the representation of a business model is not sufficient, as it does not include the rationale behind the model. In this paper, we propose an extension of e3-value to support strategic analysis on three dimensions: competition analysis, customer analysis and capability analysis

Elicitation of Requirements for a Business Process Model Repository

Today, there exist a number of process repositories with the aim of supporting the reuse of process models. Designing such repositories is a complex task, which should be guided by clear requirements. In order to support the development of future process repositories, we propose and justify a set of requirements for such repositories. These requirements are based on a number of essential properties of process repositories as well as a set of use cases. Furthermore, we carry out a survey and evaluation of a number of existing repositories based on the requirements identified in this paper.

A Model-Driven Approach for Designing E-Services Using Business Ontological Frameworks

A constant goal of enterprises of all sizes is to align their business with IT. The major concern is to design the technology to support the desired performance goals and business values. In e-business collaborations, services are becoming the cornerstones for modeling the offerings of the involved parties. However, business concepts, like value offerings, typically cannot be linked to technology levels, such as SOA and Web services. Business value models, formulated in terms of economic values, have been recognized as the basis for eliciting the actors in a business scenario and their relationships. Recently, several business ontological frameworks have been proposed to facilitate the design of business value models. Aiming towards an MDA-aligned approach, in our study we consider business value models for creating a service-centric Computational Independent Model (CIM). By utilizing well-defined mappings, the model is further transformed into a UML-based system model at the Platform Independent Model (PIM) level, capturing both the static and behavioral specifications of elicited e-services.

Exploring business value models from the inter-organizational collaboration perspective

From a strategic enterprise perspective, the success of e-services depends on their ability to work as a medium for the exchange of business values. Thus, there is a need to be able to describe and analyze business collaborations in a structured way, in order to identify the needs and appropriate offerings of the participating actors. To model business collaborations, business value models are increasingly used. However, a question remains - how to systematically create value models in order to identify the offerings of the involved actors, while spanning the whole life-cycle of a business collaboration? In this study we propose a method for designing more exploratory business models with a focus to how: (a). consumers classify values, and (b). the values are elicited in different phases of business collaboration life-cycle. A case study from the Swedish health care sector is used to ground and apply the presented method.

An MDA Method for Service Modeling by Formalizing REA and Open-edi Business Frameworks with SBVR

Business frameworks offer great opportunities of communication between people for working on the enterprise system engineering processes, as well as for eliciting services that the enterprise can offer in collaboration contexts. However, these kinds of frameworks, such as Resource-Event-Agent and Open-edi, recently unified in Open-edi Business Ontology (OeBTO), lack formal representations. This fact considerably limits their use in system development, particularly in model-driven development methods where the efficiency of transformations is of great importance. In this paper we suggest a formalization of OeBTO using OMG’s standard Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), as a method for creating a service-centric business model. This makes it possible to provide the necessary formal logic foundation to allow automatic processing of the business model and its transformation to a system-level service model. An example from the bank loan business sector is used to argument the application of the method.

Value-Based Risk Management for Web Information Goods

Alongside with the growth of the World Wide Web, the exchange of information goods is tremendously increasing. Some information has entertainment value, and some has business value, but regardless of that, more and more people are willing to pay for information. Business models have become a common technique for representing the value exchanges among the actors involved in a business constellation. In this study, we utilize the notion of the business model to investigate and classify risks on the value of information goods and further, to propose adequate risk mitigation instruments.

Exploring Business Value Models for E-Service Design

Contemporary enterprises face strong pressures to increase competitiveness by engaging in alliances of several kinds. In a rapidly increasing degree, traditional organizational structures evolve towards online business using modern ICT - such as the Internet, semantic standards, process- and service-oriented architectures. For efficient applications of inter-organizational information systems, the alignment between business and ICT is a key factor. At the ICT level, Web services are used as the cornerstones for modeling the interaction points of Web applications. So far, development of Web services has focused on a technical perspective, such as the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. Thereby, business concepts, such as economic values exchanged among the cooperating actors, cannot be traced in Web service specifications. As a consequence, business and ICT models become difficult to keep aligned. To address this issue, the authors propose a MDA-based approach for design of software services which may be implemented using Web services and Web service coordinations. The proposal focuses on a value-explorative analysis and modeling of business services at the CIM level, and model transformations using UML 2 to the PIM level, by utilizing well-defined mappings.