=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-336/paper-6
|storemode=property
|title=Enterprise Sustainability through the Alignment of Goal Models and Business Models
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-336/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-336
|authors=Birger Andersson,Maria Bergholtz,Anananda Edirisuriya,Tharaka Ilayperuma,Prasad Jayaweera,Paul Johannesson and Jelena Zdravkovic
}}
==Enterprise Sustainability through the Alignment of Goal Models and Business Models==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-336/paper6.pdf
Enterprise Sustainability through the Alignment of
Goal Models and Business Models
Birger Andersson1, Maria Bergholtz1, Ananda Edirisuriya1, Tharaka Ilayperuma1,
Prasad Jayaweera2, Paul Johannesson1, Jelena Zdravkovic1
1
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology
Forum 100, SE-164 40 Kista, Sweden
{ba, maria, si-ana, si-tsi, pajo, jzc}@dsv.su.se
2
Department of Computer Science
University of Ruhuna
Matara, Sri Lanka
prasad@ruh.ac.lk
Abstract. Business modelling can be used as a starting point for business
analysis. The core of a business model is information about resources, events,
agents, and their relations. The motivation of a business model can be found in
the goals of an enterprise and those are made explicit in a goal model. This
paper discusses the alignment of business models with goal models and
proposes a method for constructing business models based on goal models. The
method assists in the design of business models that conform to the explicit
goals of an enterprise. Main benefits are clear and uniform goal formulations,
well founded business model designs, and increased traceability between
models.
1 Introduction
The arguably most important objective of an organisation is to be sustainable. By
sustainable is meant that the organisation should be able to produce value to its
environment that are in demand over time. In doing so the organisation in turn needs
to import resources, such as labour or information, from its environment. By engaging
in such imports and exports of resources the organisation becomes part of
constellations of cooperating actors.
A major concern for all actors is how to adapt to change. If an enterprise is unable
to adapt to changes in environmental conditions then it will fail and hence render the
enterprise unsustainable. To understand where and how to adapt, models of the
enterprise are made and used for analyses. The models can be separated into layers
where each layer is concerned with one particular aspect:
− Goal layer. The goal layer is described by means of goal models. Goal models are
used in the earliest phases of business and information systems design, where they
help in clarifying interests, intentions, and strategies of different stakeholders
answering to the "why" of the business.
74 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
− Business layer. The business layer is described by means of business models.
Business models give a high level view of the activities taking place in and
between organizations by identifying agents, resources and the exchange of
resources between the agents. So, a business model focuses on the “what” of a
business.
− Process layer. The process layer is described by means of process models. Process
models focus on the “how” of a business, as they deal with operational and
procedural aspects of business communication, including control flow, data flow
and message passing.
While the overall goals can remain the same over long periods of time the procedures
that realize these goals may change frequently. A similar abstraction from another
domain, IT system design, is the model driven architecture (MDA). In there the
specifics of a system are placed in a separate layer from the general and thereby
creating a more stable set of models. The layered abstraction is a valuable tool to
understand enterprises or systems in the light of change.
It is important that the activities performed at the process layer are aligned with the
declarations in the business layer. Likewise, it is important that the declarations of
what to do are aligned with the goals of the enterprise. If not, what is done is not
properly motivated, and the things done are not necessarily what should be done.
Research and motivations on the importance of alignment can be found e.g., in [8],
[15], [9].
In this paper we will investigate the relation between the notions of goal models
and the notions of business models. We will argue that bridging the gap between
business layer and the goal layer amounts to formulating goals in business model
notions. We acknowledge that not all kinds of goals are possible to formulate in this
way but we argue that a sufficient amount of them are to make this work worthwhile
and the results useful.
For illustration purposes we will use the framework and terminology of the
Business Motivation Model (BMM) [3] to capture goals and use the framework and
terminology of e3value [6] for business modelling. We will illustrate how the
connection between goal models and business models can be exploited by proposing
and outlining a method for model alignment. The method amounts to decomposing
goals to the level of means and expressing the means using e3value notions. The
method approach is to use templates for means formulation to accomplish the
alignment. The main benefits of the method lie in its simplicity and uniformity in
goals formulations.
A benefit of this work is that business models become more closely connected to
strategic concerns while considering the role that the enterprise has in business
collaboration. It also provides a possibility to validate the business models against the
goals of an enterprise. Both benefits are instrumental for the sustainability of an
enterprise.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives related
research on business model and goal model alignment and Section 3 provides an
introduction to business model ontologies. A running Massively Multiplayer Online
Games (MMOG) modelling example is introduced that describes the chosen business
modelling notation. Section 4 gives an overview of goal models while Section 5
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 75
addresses how goal models can be related to business models by means of a number
of templates for structuring means formulation. In Section 6 a method for
transforming a given business model into a new business model based on a goal
model is suggested. Its main points are illustrated through an application on the
MMOG example. Section 7 concludes the paper and gives suggestions for further
research.
2 Related Work
Recent research emphasizes that compelling IT solutions need to be derived from
business goals, further structured in business models with particular value
propositions. In [7], the authors discuss the relationship between goal and business
models as a foundation for the identification of goal-aligned and economically
profitable business services, but without proposing a method for relating goals with
business model components. In [8], the authors propose a method for transforming the
goal-oriented i* framework [14] to the value-based e3value framework [6]. The
method starts by modelling the goals, the dependencies and the tasks of the
collaborating actors using the i* technique, and ends with deriving a goal-aligned
e3value model using the guidelines for mapping the elements of the two frameworks.
Our work differs in two major aspects: a) to achieve uniformity in goal modelling, we
suggest formulating the elements of goal models in terms of business model concepts
in general, and b) to enable a transparent mapping from goal to value models. In the
goal-analysis we set the focus to the perspective of single enterprise and its primary
business activities to formulate a set of templates for a seamless connection of the two
models. The proposed approach also extends [1], which has introduced the notion of
the means-templates for transforming a business model into one that also takes goals
into consideration.
2.2 Business Models
There exist a number of approaches, languages, and ontologies for business models in
the literature, e.g., [2], [5], [11], [12]. For the purpose of this paper we will make use
of a comprehensive and well established business model ontology, the e3value [6].
The e3value ontology aims at identifying exchanges of value objects between the
actors in a business case. It also supports profitability analyses of business cases. The
ontology was designed to contain a minimal set of concepts and relations to make it
easy to grasp for its intended users. The e3value model also includes a graphical
notation to design business models. The basic concepts in e3value are actor, market
segment, value object, value port, value interface, value activity and value exchange.
• An actor is an economically independent entity. An actor is often, but not
necessarily, a legal entity, such as an enterprise or end-consumer or even a
software agent. A set of actors can be grouped together into a market segment.
• A value object is something that is of economic value for at least one actor, e.g., a
car, Internet access, or a stream of music.
76 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
• A value port is used by an actor to provide or receive value objects to or from other
actors. A value port has a direction: in (e.g., receive goods) or out (e.g., make a
payment), indicating whether a value object flows into or out of the actor.
• A value interface consists of in and out ports that belong to the same actor. Value
interfaces are used to model economic reciprocity.
• A value exchange is a pair of value ports of opposite directions belonging to
different actors. It represents one or more potential trades of value objects between
these value ports.
• A value activity is an operation that can be carried out in an economically
profitable way for at least one actor.
Fig. 1. e3value model for the MMOG case
Figure 1 is an e3value model of a real world business case that will be used as a
running example. It models the various value exchanges between a provider of
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), its customers and a business
associate, an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Actors are shown by rectangles, value
activities by rounded rectangles, value ports by triangles, value interfaces by oblong
rectangles enclosing directed value ports, and value exchanges as lines between value
ports with the names of value objects as labels. In this business model there are two
actors and a market segment involved – the Game Provider, the ISP and the
Customer. The Game Provider is responsible for producing the Game Content and
selling and distributing its software on CDs to the customers. In order to play the
game, the customers need internet access, which they get from the ISP. They also
need access to the game server, which they get from the Game Provider.
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 77
2.3 Goal Models
Goal models are used to capture and make explicit the goals of an enterprise. They
direct the enterprise toward concrete actions, and as a consequence, the elicited
actions are firmly based on a business motivation. A goal is defined as a desirable
state the enterprise wants to reach.
As with business models, there exists a number of different goal models where
some are used in Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) for IT systems,
for instance the KAOS model [4], and some are used for business analysis, for
instance i* [14], or the Business Motivation Model (BMM) [3]. Since the purpose of
our work is analysis and design of business models, we need a goal modelling
approach that uses a small set of concepts that can be understood by business experts
and that support the representation of vague, human-based intentions, actions and
relations. For this reason, we use the BMM, as the technique focuses on the states an
enterprise (i.e. the principal actor) wishes to achieve, as well as on the actions that
will enable the achievement of those states. The technique relies on the use of three
major concepts – Ends, Means, and Influencers.
• An End is something the enterprise seeks to accomplish, without any indication of
how it will be achieved. When an enterprise intends to describe ends in the form of
desired qualitative business results, it uses the notion of goal. A goal is a statement
about a condition of the enterprise to be achieved. A typical goal of a car-rental
company could be “to provide leading customer service”.
• A Means represents any capability or instrument that may be used to achieve Ends.
BMM categorizes means into three categories: missions, courses of actions and
directives. A mission indicates the ongoing operational activity of an enterprise and
describes what the business is or will be doing on a day-to-day basis. A course of
action “is an approach or plan for configuring some aspect of the enterprise
involving things, processes, locations, people, timing, or motivation” [3]. A
directive governs a course of action, i.e., it describes how the course of action
should, or should not, be carried out. For the previously given goal example, a
means for providing a leading customer service can be “hire experienced customer
service personnel”. When a goal is described in a highly abstract manner, it is
common to first divide it into sub-goals down to the level where they can be
supported by concrete means. Means are represented as leaf nodes in a goal tree.
• An Influencer is anything that may impact the achievement of means (and thereby
goals). An influencer is either external to the enterprise (such as customers,
competitors, environment, technology, etc.) or internal (for instance, resources or
infrastructure). An influencer is neutral until its impact on means or goals is
assessed. An impact may be categorized in different ways; a simple and commonly
accepted classification is as strength or weakness for internal influencers, and as
opportunity or threat for external ones [10].
In Figure 2, we illustrate the basic BMM elements and their relations using a small
excerpt of a goal model for the MMOG case.
78 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
Goal1: Level of player
satisfaction shall be high
part Of
Goal2: Cost of game Goal3: Games
access shall be low shall be attractive
opportunityFor supports
Influencer1: Increased interest Means1: Procure innovative
in playing computer games game stories from Customer
Fig. 2. Excerpt of a goal model for the MMOG case
In the given example, the goal “Level of player satisfaction shall be high” is analysed
into two sub-goals; “Cost of game access shall be low” and “Games shall be
attractive”. The latter is, as an illustration, supported by the means “Procure
Innovative Game Stories from Customer“. The influencer “Increased interest in
playing Computer games” is assessed as an external impact providing an opportunity
for obtaining innovative game scenarios.
4 Bridging Goal Models and Business models
4.1 Relating Goal and Value Concepts
A common problem in goal modelling is that goals are difficult to formulate, that is,
the formulations of goals and means often become loose and highly abstract. In [13],
the authors argue that goal models become unfocused because goals range from the
value propositions of an enterprise to general goals of economic sustainability. We
suggest overcoming this problem by expressing goal model elements in terms of
business model notions. As discussed, business models describe the use and
exchanges of resources that are of economic value for the participating actors. Means
in BMM play a key role in aligning a business model with a goal model. The most
important category of means for this purpose is the missions, i.e., the means that
describe the day-to-day activities of an enterprise. According to BMM, a mission
statement consists of three parts: an action part, a product or service part, and a
market or customer part. Thus, the parts of a mission statement map directly to the
components of a business model. After surveying a large number of goal models, we
have found that the action part of a mission statement typically concern the
acquisition, production or provisioning of value objects.
These observations motivate the following guidelines for formulating goals and
means in BMM (the guidelines for means are elaborated in Section 4.2. Guidelines for
influencers are not considered in this paper).
• A Goal is expressed as a desired condition on one or more features of a resource,
from one particular actor’s point of view. One example from the MMOG case is
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 79
“Level of player satisfaction (resource) shall be high”. Formulating a goal in this
way makes the expression more uniform.
• A Means that is a mission should be formulated according to the templates in
Section 4.2. Courses of actions and directives are to be formulated as requirements
on, or actions taken on, value objects, value exchanges and value activities. For the
MMOG case, some examples of means may include “Outsource (action) 50% of
production of Game Content (value object)”, or “Procure (action) Innovative Game
Stories (value object) from Customer (market segment)”.
• An Influencer is expressed as a condition that leads to support, refinement or
removal of one or more means. For example, an “Increased interest in playing
computer games” supports the means (see Figure 2) for acquiring innovative Game
Stories from customers.
A problem in goal models concerns the resolution of conflicts among goals and
means. This is, as proposed in [4] and [14], typically solved by determining the
conflicting goals and then evaluating which of the goals to preserve by, for instance,
categorizing their importance. In our goal-value analysis, we allow the discovery of
goal conflicts at two levels – either as described previously at the goal model level, or
at the business model, i.e., when the means are realised by employing certain value
components in the business model. For instance, if a means requires the use of a value
activity, and another prevents its use, the business modeller will discover the conflict,
which in turn might origin from the goals that do not appear to be in conflict.
4.2 Means Templates
In this subsection, we elaborate the guideline for formulating mission statements by
introducing a number of templates. As stated in the previous subsection, almost all
action parts of BMM mission statements concern the acquisition, production, or
provisioning of resources. In other words, these BMM means address the fundamental
entities of business models describing with whom the principal actor exchanges value
objects, what value objects are exchanged and what value activities there are to
produce and consume these value objects. Thus, it becomes possible to formulate all
BMM mission statements according to a small number of templates. Furthermore,
some courses of actions can also be formulated using the templates below. However,
most courses of actions are about refining and stating requirements on existing value
objects, value exchanges and value activities, which have already been addressed by
mission statements. This means that the guideline in the previous section is to be used
for these courses of actions.
The following syntax is used for the templates. Each template has two parts, one
compulsory and one optional, which is written within square brackets. The optional
part describes possible actions that could be carried out in order to fulfil the action
named in the compulsory part. The sign ‘|’ is interpreted as exclusive-or. Words in
italic are non terminals and are replaced by actual goal model terms when formulating
the mission statements of BMM means. An optional discriminator can be pre-pended
to a value activity filling the same function as a grammatical adjective. A “decrease
production” is an example of a value activity “produce” pre-pended with the optional
discriminator “decrease”.
80 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
The compulsory part contains the most important piece of information, while the
optional part provides complementary information about the consequences of the
compulsory part. A goal modeller may choose to fill in the optional part in order to
provide complete information, but in many cases it is preferable to leave it out in
order to make the goal model less complex. However, the business modeller has to
complete the optional part before she is working towards the to-be business model.
Templates are composed of triplets representing activities at value interface, and
pairs representing value activities in the principal actor. An activity name in the
templates represents the enactment (start) of that activity and is pre-pended with
“stop” to represent the termination of an activity.
The intuition behind the identification of following template categories is that any
enterprise can be seen procuring value objects (input) from suppliers, producing value
objects (process) within the enterprise and then offering value objects (output) to its
customers. In this paper, nine means templates have been formulated. As mentioned
above, a goal modeller starts with the compulsory part (triplet) of the following
templates. Each activity in the compulsory part of templates falls into one of the
categories; value object offering, value object procuring or value object production.
For all means template categories listed below, enactment (start) and termination
(stop) of relevant activities are identified. For the most central value object production
category, in addition to start and stop, activities with discriminators have also been
introduced.
Value Object Offering Means Templates
All mission statements that deal with value object offering towards customers could
be captured using this template category.
1. offer ValueObject1 to Actor1 [use ValueActivity1 | produce ValueObject1 | procure
ValueObject1 from Actor2 AND receive ValueObject2 from Actor1]
2. stop offer ValueObject1 to Actor1[stop procure ValueObject1 from Actor2 | stop produce
ValueObject1]
The first template addresses the business activity of exchanging value objects between
actors. The compulsory part deals with the business activity of providing a value
object to an actor. The first optional part addresses the origin of the value object and
offers three alternatives: use an existing value activity, start a new value activity in the
principal actor to produce the value object, or procure it from another actor. The
second optional part specifies what value object is received as a compensation for the
resource provided by the principal actor.
The second template addresses the issue of stopping providing a certain value
object. The optional part of the template has an effect only if the principal actor stops
offering the value object to all actors. In that case, the optional part says that this can
be done by either stopping producing the value object or by stopping procuring it
from another actor.
Value Object Procuring Means Templates
All mission statements that deal with value object procuring from suppliers could be
captured with this templates category.
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 81
3. procure ValueObject1 from Actor1 [use ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1 | offer
ValueObject1 to Actor2 AND provide ValueObject1 to Actor1]
4. stop procure ValueObject1 from Actor1 [stop offer ValueObject1 to Actor2 | produce
ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1]
The compulsory part in third template is related to the procurement of a value object
by the principal actor from another actor. The optional part describes the possible
effects of the procurement of the value object. The value object procured may be used
as an input to produce a certain value object or it may be offered directly to the
principal actor’s customers.
The fourth template addresses the issue of stop procuring a value object from
another actor. The possible effects of this action is that the principal actor may have to
start the production of the value object in order to be able to continue providing the
value object to the customers or he may have to stop offering that object. However,
the actions in the optional part depend on whether the principal actor stops procuring
the value object from all the suppliers or not. Depending on that, one of the
alternatives in the optional part is chosen.
Value Object Producing Means Templates
All mission statements that deal to value object productions in an enterprise could be
captured with this templates category.
5. produce ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1 [offer ValueObject1 to Actor1]
6. stop produce ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1 [procure ValueObject1 from Actor2 | stop
offer ValueObject1 to all]
7. (increase | decrease) produce of ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1
8. insource produce of ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1 [(increase) produce ValueObject1
AND stop procure ValueObject1 from Actor]
9. outsource [fraction of] produce of ValueObject1 in ValueActivity1 [(stop | decrease
fraction of) produce of ValueObject1 AND procure ValueObject1 from Actor AND
provide ValueObject2 to Actor]
The fifth template states that if the production of a value object is started then
it must be offered to some actor.
The compulsory part in the sixth template deals with the issue of stopping the
production of a value object. The optional part describes the possible actions to deal
with that situation. The first choice is to start procuring the value object in order to
offer it to the customers. The other option is to stop offering the value object to all the
customers.
The seventh template deals with the increment or decrement of the production of a
value object. Furthermore, means of this kind have no effect on the business model
but only on the process model.
The compulsory part of the eighth template takes care of the situation where the
production of a value object is insourced. If the production is insourced, then it will
lead either to an increase of the production in an existing value activity or to start a
new value activity to produce the value object.
82 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
The compulsory part of ninth template is applicable to the situation where the
production of a value object is outsourced, which will lead to either a decrease or
stopping of production. In addition to that the principal actor must also start procuring
the value object, whose production has been outsourced, and start providing a value
object as compensation.
In this subsection, we have shown in detail how some goal model components can
be related to business model notions. This could also be viewed as a formalisation of
BMM mission statements using e3value model notions. We have focused on mission
statements as these have a direct impact on the design of business models. Mission
statements will result in additions, deletions and modifications of a business model as
discussed in the method in the next section. In contrast, other parts of a BMM goal
model do not directly influence the design of the business model. In particular, most
courses of actions and directives concern details and lower level aspects that only
have an impact on process design.
5 A Method for Creating a Goal Based Business Model
In this section, we discuss how business models should be aligned with goal models.
For that purpose, we propose a method that takes as input a business model and a goal
model and produces a new business model conforming to the goal model. In other
words, a to-be business model is constructed using an as-is business model and a goal
model as inputs. The main instrument used in the method is the means templates
discussed in the previous section.
Using this method the goal modeller first needs to construct the goal model
expressed in terms of business model notions, which is accomplished by formulating
the means according to the aforementioned means templates. It is the responsibility of
a business modeller to make use of the means supplied by the goal modeller and
construct the to-be business model. For some means, the goal modeller may have
filled in only the compulsory part of the means template and left out the optional part.
In such cases, it is the responsibility of the business modeller to first elicit the missing
information and fill in the optional part of the means template. The method can be
summarized as follows:
1. The goal modeller constructs a goal model using the means templates
2. For each means the business modeller
− complements the means by filling in the optional parts of its template when
needed
− modifies the business model based on the completed means template
An Application of the Method
In this section, we use the means templates to construct the to-be business model
using the goal model from section 3 and the Massively Multiplayer Online Games
(MMOG) business model example as input (see Figure 1).
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 83
The MMOG case includes three actors: An ISP, a Game Provider and a Customer.
The Game Provider is the principal actor responsible for producing the Game
Content. In this particular MMOG the Game Provider has the intellectual property
right and players are not allowed to create their own content or do special
customizations. To sell and distribute games the Game Provider obtains the services
of an ISP, who in turn receives payment as compensation. Customers pay the Game
Provider to access games. Finally two value exchanges take place between the ISP
and the Customer: Internet access from the ISP to Customer and Payment from
Customer to the ISP.
Goal1: Level of popularity Goal3: Level of player Goal2: Level of Customer
part Of
part Of
shall be high satisfaction shall be high base shall be high
part Of part Of supports
Goal4: Level of customer Goal5: Cost of game Goal6: Game shall be Means4: Offer free trail
service shall be good access shall be low attractive games to customers
part Of part Of part Of
opportunityFor
Goal7: Delivery of CD Goal8: Cost of game Means2: Procure innovative
shall be fast production shall be low game stories from customer
supports opportunityFor supports opportunityFor
Means1: Outsource Influencer2: Availability of Means3: Outsource Influencer1: Increased
production of competitive transportation 50% of production interesting playing
CD delivery services of game content computer games
Fig. 3. A goal model for the MMOG case
Figure 3 shows a goal model for the MMOG business scenario from the Game
Provider's (the principle actor’s) point of view. The figure describes the top goals,
sub-goals and their relationships. Each means in the goal tree is a leaf node. The
means “Outsource CD delivery” supports fulfilling the goal “Delivery of CD shall be
fast”. The influencer “Availability of competitive transport services” is assessed to
provide an opportunity to obtain low cost transport services.
In most cases value objects are explicitly modelled in each means, for instance in
Means 1: “Outsource CD delivery”, the value object affected is “CD delivery”. In
mapping these means onto the corresponding templates it is, however, assumed that
the explicitly present value objects (and corresponding value exchanges) are related to
additional value exchanges in the opposite direction, most commonly payment for
receiving a good or service. In some cases other ways of providing compensation for
a value exchange are present, such as in the case of Means 2: “offer Free trial games
to Customer”. Here the Game Provider offers the value object “Free trial games” to
the Customer, and receives the value object “Attention” in return.
Method Application to the running case
For each means in the goal model (1) select the means template and if needed
complement the means with the optional part of the template, and (2) use the business
model components (e.g. Value Objects, Value Exchanges, etc.) in the template to
construct the to-be business model. The following examples show the result of
applying the method to the business model of Figure 1.
84 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
Means 1: Outsource production of CD delivery
Select template 9 and complement with the optional part.
outsource produce of CD delivery (value object) in Transport CDs (value activity) [stop
produce of CD delivery (value object) AND procure CD delivery (value object) from Shipper
(actor) AND provide Payment (value object) to Shipper (actor)
According to the information given in the template to realize the Means1, we need to
introduce a new actor Shipper to the business model to provide a shipping service.
The value activity (Transport CDs) that currently provides the transport service (CD
delivery) should be removed from Game Provider. It also leads to adding one value
exchange to procure the transport service from the Shipper and a corresponding
reciprocal exchange for the Payment. Those exchanges are added to a new value
interface. See c, in Figure 4.
Means 2: Procure Innovative Game Stories from Customer
Select template 3 and complement with the optional part.
procure Innovative Game Stories (value object) from Customer (actor) [use Innovative Game
Stories (value object) in Create Content (value activity) AND provide Payment (value object)
to Customer (actor)]
This means will lead to the addition of a new value exchange and a new interface for
procuring Innovative Game Stories from the Customer. It will also add a new value
exchange related to the Payment from Game Provider to Customer. Those exchanges
will then be connected to the existing value activity Create Content that uses these
Innovative Game Stories to produce Game Contents. See d, in Figure 4.
Means 3: Outsource 50% of production of Game Content
Select template 9 and complement with the optional part.
outsource 50 % of produce of Game Content (value object) in Create Game Content (value
activity) [stop 50 % of produce of Game Content (value activity) AND procure Game Content
(value object) from Customer (actor) AND provide Payment (value object) to Customer (actor)
This means will result in using the customer market segment to outsource 50% of the
production of the Game Content and decreasing the production of Game Content by
50% in the Create Content value activity in the Game Provider. The decrement of the
production will not be visible as a structural change in the model. It will be addressed
at the process level of the Game Provider's business. The outsourcing is visible in the
model by means of new value exchanges: one for procuring the Game Content and
the other for making the payment to the Customer. See e in Figure 4.
Means 4: Offer Free trial games to Customer
Select template 1 and complement with the optional part.
Proceedings of BUSITAL’08 85
offer Free Trial Games (value object) to Customer (actor) [use Distribute Games (value
activity) AND receive Attention (value object) from Customer (market segment)
Offering free trial games to the customer will add new value exchanges between
Game Provider and Customer for both offering Free trial games and receiving
customer attention as a compensation for that. See f, in Figure 4.
Fig. 4. Extended e3value model for MMOG case
6. Conclusion and discussion
This paper has argued that for an enterprise to be sustainable its operational processes
should conform to its strategic goals. A mismatch may occur as a consequence of e.g,
change in the environment, and cases of non-alignments must be discovered,
analysed, and corrected. Instrumental for this is the use of different kinds of enterprise
models. We have focused on a part of the complex issue of business and IT alignment
by addressing the problems of aligning business models with goal models. A method
was proposed that takes as input a goal model and an as-is business model and makes
the business model conformant through transformation. The method relies on the
existence of a link between goal and business models, which is primarily provided
through the notion of means.
The proposed approach offers a number of benefits:
• Clear and uniform goal model formulation. Formulating goals and means in terms
of the business model notions encourage precise expressions and clarify the
86 Proceedings of BUSITAL’08
relationships among the components of a goal model. Furthermore, this approach
of formulating goals and means make goal models more uniform and objective in
the sense that different designers will express a given goal or means in similar
ways.
• Well founded business model design. The proposed method provides a way for
designing business models that are firmly based on the goals and needs of an
enterprise as expressed in a goal model.
• Traceability. It is possible to relate the components of a goal model to those of a
business model, as the goal model has to be formulated in terms of the notions in
the business model. Furthermore, components of a business model are directly
motivated by the goal model.
A number of issues need to be addressed in future work. One question is about the
completeness of the proposed means templates. We have argued that the template list
covers a large part of the basic activities of an enterprise – acquire, provide, produce,
or maintain resources. It is indeed possible to analyze the activities further and
propose a more detailed list of means, e.g., "Provide" may be replaced by "Give
access over the web", or "Deliver at the door". Those templates would be more
precise but also less general and it is an open issue how to strike the balance between
these two properties.
Still another issue is the practical applicability of the approach and what support a
designer would need to apply it. This concerns in particular how a designer should be
assisted in applying the means templates. The span of assistance ranges from
guidelines to encodings it in a tool and what the appropriate level needs further
investigation.
Another practical question left for future research is that of changing or extending
the syntax of business models to reflect their relations to goal models. We have done
a few experiments annotating the constructs in the business model to capture the
relations. The main rationale for this was to support the modeller by increasing
traceability. The down side was that it introduced clutter into the business model. An
open question is to decide precisely how to maintain traceability and, if using
annotations, how to keep complexity at an acceptable level.
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