SOA-Driven Business-Software Alignment

The alignment of business processes and their supporting application software is a major concern during the initial software design phases. This paper proposes a design approach addressing this problem of business-software alignment. The approach takes an initial business model as a basis in deriving refined models that target a service-oriented software implementation. The approach explicitly identifies a software modeling level at which software modules are represented as services in a technology-platformindependent way. This model-driven service-oriented approach has the following properties: (i) there is a forced alignment (consistency) between business processes and supporting applications; (ii) changes in the business environment can be traced to the application and vice versa, via model relationships; (iii) the software modules modeled as services have a high degree of autonomy; (iv) migration to new technology platforms can be supported through the platform independent software model

Model-driven design of context-aware applications

In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the business modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, states that correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, what is valid for application design in general, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously proposed business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design

Business models and information systems for sustainable development

Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect, namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be taken into account when extending existing work

Business engineering building blocks

In order to utilize the contemporary advanced technology, business processes need sound software support. With respect to this, one frequent cause of software project failure is the mismatch between the business requirements and the actual functionality of the delivered software application. To solve this problem, it is necessary to build software stemming out from a business process model. Aiming at aligning business process modeling and software design in a component-based way, the proposed research investigates the identification of generic business engineering building blocks and their use for building ICT applications which effectively support business processes

A Tool to Model and Simulate Dynamic Business Models

Software tools hold great promise to support the modeling, analyzing, and innovation of business models. Current tools only focus on the design of business models and do not incorporate the complexity of existing interdependencies between business model components. These tools merely allow simulating inherent dynamics within the models or different strategic decision scenarios. In this research, we use design science research to develop a prototype that is capable of modeling and simulating dynamic business models. We use system dynamics as a simulation approach and containers to allow deployment as web applications. This paper represents the first of three design cycles, realizing six out of 59 requirements that are collected from the literature on software tools for business models. We contribute toward the design of novel artifacts for business model innovation as well as their evaluation. Future research can use these results to build tools that consider and address the complexity of business models. Lastly, we present several options for extending the proposed tool in the future

How Software Can Support Innovating Business Models: A Taxonomy of Functions of Business Model Development Tools

The interest in business model innovation has risen rapidly in recent years, and software tools for business model development hold great promise for supporting business model innovation. Nonetheless, virtually no design-relevant knowledge exists concerning the functions that such tools should possess. Therefore, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy that identifies characteristic functions of software-based business model development tools. For developing the taxonomy, we draw on prior research on business model innovation, process modeling, and creativity support systems, and we analyze software tools for business model development that have been proposed in practice. The resulting taxonomy can support practitioners in their tool (re-)design and investment decisions, and for researchers can serve as a preliminary step towards more advanced theories for software tools for business model development

BORM - Business Object Relation Modeling

BORM is an object-oriented and process-based analysis and design methodology, which has proved to be effective in the development of business systems. The effectiveness gained is largely due to an unified and simple method for presenting necessary aspects of the relevant business model, which can be simulated, verified and validated for subsequent software implementation. The BORM methodology makes extensive use of business process modeling towards the area of software engineering. This paper outlines BORM and presents it on an application example created in Craft.CASE analysis and modeling tool

The E-commerce Potential for Home-based Businesses: a Case Study

In Jakarta, the e-Business adoption has not only captured the interest of large organizations but has also been acknowledged and adopted by small, medium and micro sized enterprises. Mostly, these small and medium e-commerce-adopted companies are called Home-Based Business. The object of this research is a family home-based business which is adopted e-commerce system. The commonly used software development method is System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is generally accepted as the standard modeling notation for the analysis and design of the object that oriented on software systems. This research concludes that a web-based system can addressed the need of home-based business to expand the market scope by the internet penetration as one alternative to do the business expansion