Halt and catch fire – A study on business model innovation and the effect of the upper echelons mental models

Master's thesis in Business administration: Executive MBAIn the face of external shifts, the upper echelons set the strategic orientation for the company and innovate their business models accordingly. However, the industry has little understanding of the influence that dynamic conditions and the dominant logic of the firm has on business model innovation. The study applies a perspective of organizational behavioral theory to examine how business model innovation is affected by the top managers mental models. The methodology uses a longitudinal study by applying a qualitative content analysis. The sample consists of the five largest aquaculture firms in Norway listed on the OSE. The context is an uncertain market with substantial exposure to threat. Results show how the strategic orientation of firms govern the top managers risk attitude, which in turn lead to different organizational outcomes. This shows a predictably irrational behavior by the top manager’s that is anchored in their strategic orientation. Findings also demonstrate how company’s value configuration may influence innovation to firm’s business models. This is shown to act as a blinder to business model innovation and were found to be especially evident among defensive organizations. As such, the result positively confirms that top manager’s mental models are essential in the decision-making process related firm’s innovation of their business model. Based on an organization’s change perspective, the study intends to prove how top managers need to proactively challenge their mental models, both from an operative and dynamic standpoint. This, to maintain or regain competitive success in the complex market outlook. Those organizations that can learn to recognize the importance of building a diversified top management team will enable the firm to exploit and recognize both internal and external shifts, to a much greater extent. This will support firms in overcoming organizational inertia and make them appropriately fit to conduct more rational strategic choices

Correct Configuration of Process Variants in Provop

When engineering process-aware information systems (PAISs) one of the fundamental challenges is to cope with the variability of business processes. While some progress has been achieved regarding the configuration of process variants, there exists only little work on how to accomplish this in a correct manner. Configuring process variants constitutes a non-trivial challenge when considering the large number of process variants that exist in practice as well as the many syntactical and semantical constraints a configured process variant has to obey in a given context. In previous work we introduced the Provop approach for configuring and managing process variants. This paper picks up the Provop framework and shows how it ensures correctness of configurable process variants by construction. We discuss advanced concepts for the context- and constraint-based configuration of process variants, and show how they can be utilized to ensure correctness of the configured process variants. In this paper we also consider correctness issues in conjunction with dynamic variant re-configurations. Enhancing PAISs with the capability to correctly configure process models fitting to the given application context, and to correctly manage the resulting process variants afterwards, will enable a new quality in PAIS engineering

Composition and Self-Adaptation of Service-Based Systems with Feature Models

The adoption of mechanisms for reusing software in pervasive systems has not yet become standard practice. This is because the use of pre-existing software requires the selection, composition and adaptation of prefabricated software parts, as well as the management of some complex problems such as guaranteeing high levels of efficiency and safety in critical domains. In addition to the wide variety of services, pervasive systems are composed of many networked heterogeneous devices with embedded software. In this work, we promote the safe reuse of services in service-based systems using two complementary technologies, Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Product Lines. In order to do this, we extend both the service discovery and composition processes defined in the DAMASCo framework, which currently does not deal with the service variability that constitutes pervasive systems. We use feature models to represent the variability and to self-adapt the services during the composition in a safe way taking context changes into consideration. We illustrate our proposal with a case study related to the driving domain of an Intelligent Transportation System, handling the context information of the environment.Work partially supported by the projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2008-01942, TIN2012-35669, TIN2012-34840 and CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER; P09-TIC-05231 and P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and FP7-317731 funded by EU. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

The capability-based view of r&d and manufacturing interface in dynamic environments

Actual technological development does not occur solely when new technological products become available. It just effectively occurs by the application of value-adding processes. These processes can only occur after manufacturing processes become viable. Therefore, companies must remain agile during product development, manufacturing, and supply and value-adding processes. The needs of the extended company must be considered. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the utilization of CBV literature as the basis for the configuration of the extended company. The qualitative, multidisciplinary, and theoretical research conducted for this paper was based on the inductive method. Manufacturing Management, Research and Development, Business Model, and Capability-Based View knowledge domains were evaluated to discover their potential contributions to design approach elements. The Capability-Based View is proposed as an approach that can be employed in the planning process for new enterprises. It can also be included in performance measurement processes. This approach enables monitoring and decision making during the evolution of Business Models by the use of organizational capabilities as the change-tolerant, performance measurement monitoring unit. This work contributes to the current literature by presenting an analysis of several knowledge domains based on the design approach. It also provides a discussion of methods of unification and suggests further research that should be conducted to enable the design of an adequate Business Model for dynamic environments

Managing Process Variants in the Process Life Cycle

When designing process-aware information systems, often variants of the same process have to be specified. Each variant then constitutes an adjustment of a particular process to specific requirements building the process context. Current Business Process Management (BPM) tools do not adequately support the management of process variants. Usually, the variants have to be kept in separate process models. This leads to huge modeling and maintenance efforts. In particular, more fundamental process changes (e.g., changes of legal regulations) often require the adjustment of all process variants derived from the same process; i.e., the variants have to be adapted separately to meet the new requirements. This redundancy in modeling and adapting process variants is both time consuming and error-prone. This paper presents the Provop approach, which provides a more flexible solution for managing process variants in the process life cycle. In particular, process variants can be configured out of a basic process following an operational approach; i.e., a specific variant is derived from the basic process by applying a set of well-defined change operations to it. Provop provides full process life cycle support and allows for flexible process configuration resulting in a maintainable collection of process variants

Grammar-oriented object design : towards dynamically reconfigurable business and software architecture for on-demand computing

Grammar-oriented Object Design was shown to be a potent combination of extending methods, incorporating DSLs from a given business domain (BDSLs) and Variation-oriented Design in order to provide a seamless transition from business models to component-based software architectures. GOOD starts by extending current object modeling techniques to include the discovery and explicit modeling of higher levels of reuse, starting from subsystems, defining their manners using a domain-specific business language, i.e., using use-case gramars, that describe the rules governing the creation, dynamic configuration and collaboration of large-grained, business-process-scale, adaptive software components with pluggable behavior, through the application of architectural patterns and representation of component manners in the BDSL. 1his presents immense potential for applications in the domains of grid services, services on demand and a utility-based model of computing where a business need initiates the convergence of application components based on/from the manners of services they provide and require

Beyond Control-Flow: Extending Business Process Configuration to Roles and Objects

A configurable process model is an integrated representation of multiple variants of a business process. It is designed to be individualized to meet a particular set of requirements. As such, configurable process models promote systematic reuse of proven or common practices. Existing notations for configurable process modeling focus on capturing tasks and control-flow dependencies, neglecting equally important aspects of business processes such as data flow, material flow and resource management. This paper fills this gap by proposing an integrated meta-model for configurable processes with advanced features for capturing resources involved in the performance of tasks (through task-role associations) as well as flow of data and physical artifacts (through task-object associations). Although embodied as an extension of a popular process modeling notation, namely EPC, the meta-model is defined in an abstract and formal manner to make it applicable to other notations