BIM-Tool: Modeling and Reasoning Support for Strategic Business Models

The BIM-Tool provides graphical modeling and analysis support for the Business Intelligence Model (BIM). BIM-Tool is a standalone application built on top of Eclipse. The tool supports two kinds of automated reasoning: (1) bottom-up “what-if” analysis: given input labels about some elements of a BIM model (for example, success/failure for leaf goals), do these propagate to other elements in the model?; and (2) top-down “is it possible?” analysis: is there a plan that leads to the satisfaction of goals, occurence/non-occurence of situations? BIM-Tool answers these questions through an encoding of BIM models in disjuntive datalog programs. 1 The Business Intelligence Model The Business Intelligence Model (BIM) [1,2] is a goal-oriented language for modeling organizational strategies. BIM relies on a set of modeling primitives that decision makers are familiar with, such as goal, task/process, indicator, situation, and influence relations among them. BIM is intended to support the notions from SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis by modeling the internal and externals factors (situations) that are (un)favorable for fulfilling strategic business goals. Some of the primitives of BIM (goals, tasks, refinement) are adopted from i*. Unlike i*, BIM does not support strategic dependencies, for BIM focuses on the high-level strategic goals of the organization, and does not ascribe goals to specific actors. BIM does not distinguish between hardand soft-goals; rather, it includes measurable indicators that determine the degree of satisfaction of goals. BIM is endowed with a formal semantics [3] that enables a variety of automatic reasoning techniques [2]: (i) goal analysis (both top-down and bottom-up), (ii) probabilistic evaluation of strategies, and (iii) reasoning with composite and qualitative indicators.