e3forces : Balancing strategic and Technical Concerns for Competitive e-Services

Various commercial e-services have emerged in the last years (eg. Google Ads). Besides requiring a solid technical foundation, these eservices must also be profitable in the long term. Such profits are achieved by creating competitive advantage. How to create competitive advantage is outlined in an organization’s business strategy. For an organization to execute its business strategy, a consistent strategic position is needed. A strategic position is however dependent on the technologies chosen to enable the e-service. The problem is therefore, to find a strategic position in which an organization can offer an e-service with a sound technical foundation, and also can execute its business strategy. To this end we present the eforces ontology as a model-based approach to find such a strategic position. eforces determines whether a strategic position meets high-level technical requirements and strategic requirements (the business strategy) by analyzing based on well known business theories the impact of environmental business forces on the e-service offered. To demonstrate and test eforces we have conducted a case study at a starting Internet company.