Comparing two business modelling approaches in the language action perspective

The increasing market turbulence and the increasing need for the creation of competitive advantages force businesses to rethink the way they perform their business. This rethinking is often performed unstructured or fragmented, and they fail to consider the business as a whole. Therefore there is a need for making a diagnosis as a basis for redesigning the business. In order to perform this diagnosis and redesign in an effective and efficient manner, there is a need for structured business modelling tools. In the current paper two business modelling methods (BAT/SIMM and DEMO) are presented that are founded in the language action perspective. The language action perspective is chosen on the premises that all organisation processes are founded in communicative action. After a theoretical introduction, the two methods are applied to a case study in order to make comparisons both methods on the theoretical and application level. The results from the comparison show that although the methods are based on the same theoretical foundation, their business models highlight different aspects of the business. Based on the comparison the paper proposes a possible integration of the two methods.