Towards increased business model comprehension – principles for an advanced business model tool

Business modelling is recognized as an important concept to make company strategies more explicit and to compare alternatives combined with their translation to the operational layer. Typically, busi-ness modelling is performed by a group of experts building on established frameworks like the Busi-ness Model Canvas. In a subsequent step, different stakeholders in a company should build upon and work with the defined business models, thus, comprehension is critical. However, this is challenging from a practical point of view and existing research has not addressed the issue of business model comprehension. In order to close this research gap and to increase users’ business model comprehen-sion, we propose an advanced business model tool and an experimental design in this research-in-progress paper. Following the design science approach, we derive a first set of meta-requirements and design principles and present an advanced business model tool instantiation. The presented tool should contribute to an increased business model comprehension by providing semantic relationships and extended business performance indicators. Finally, we present a set of testable hypotheses and the research design for an experimental tool evaluation. With this research we intend to provide a solu-tion to the problem of business model comprehension and contribute to the design knowledge base of business model tools

Colorado water, February 2002

The scope of the newsletter is devoted to enhancing communication between Colorado water users and managers and faculty at the research universities in the state.Newsletter of the Water Center at Colorado State University

Automated Identification and Prioritization of Business Risks in e-service Networks

Modern e-service providers rely on service innovation to stay relevant. Once a new service package is designed, implementation-specific aspects such as value (co-)creation and cost/benefit analysis are investigated. However, due to time-to-market or competitive advantage constraints, innovative services are rarely assessed for potential risks of fraud before they are put out on the market. But these risks may result in loss of economic value for actors involved in the e-service’s provision.\ud Our e3fraude3fraud approach automatically generates and prioritizes undesired-able scenarios from a business value model of the e-service, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to conduct an assessment. We provide examples from telecom service provision to motivate and illustrate the utility of the tool

Conceptual model for usable multi-modal mobile assistance during Umrah

Performing Umrah is very demanding and to be performed in very crowded environments. In response to that, many efforts have been initiated to overcome the difficulties faced by pilgrims. However, those efforts focus on acquiring initial perspective and background knowledge before going to Mecca. Findings of preliminary study show that those efforts do not support multi-modality for user interaction. Nowadays the computational capabilities in mobile phones enable it to serve people in various aspects of daily life. Consequently, the mobile phone penetration has increased dramatically in the last decade. Hence, this study aims to propose a comprehensive conceptual model for usable multimodal mobile assistance during Umrah called Multi-model Mobile Assistance during Umrah (MMA-U). Thus, four (4) supporting objectives are formulated, and the Design Science Research Methodology has been adopted. For the usability of MMA-U, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) indicates ten (10) attributes: usefulness, errors rate, simplicity, reliability, ease of use, safety, flexibility, accessibility, attitude, and acceptability. Meanwhile, the content and comparative analysis result in five (5) components that construct the conceptual model of MMA-U: structural, content composition, design principles, development approach, technology, and the design and usability theories. Then, the MMA-U has been reviewed and well-accepted by 15 experts. Later, the MMA-U was incorporated into a prototype called Personal Digital Mutawwif (PDM). The PDM was developed for the purpose of user test in the field. The findings indicate that PDM facilitates the execution of Umrah and successfully meet pilgrims’ needs and expectations. Also, the pilgrims were satisfied and felt that they need to have PDM. In fact, they would recommend PDM to their friends, which mean that use of PDM is safe and suitable while performing Umrah. As a conclusion, the theoretical contribution; the conceptual model of MMA-U; provides guidelines for developing multimodal content mobile applications during Umrah

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales