e3forces: Understanding Strategies of Networked e 3 value Constellations by Analyzing Environmental Forces

Enterprises increasingly form networked value constellations; networks of enterprises that can jointly satisfy complex consumer needs, while still focusing on core competencies. Information technology and information systems play an important role for such constellations, for instance to coordinate inter-organizational business processes and/or to offer an IT-intensive product, such as music or games. To do successful requirements engineering for these information systems it is important to understand its context; being here the constellation itself. To this end, business value modeling approaches for networked constellations, such as evalue , BMO, or REA, can be used. In this paper, we extend these business value modeling approaches to understand the strategic rationale of business value models. We introduce two dominant schools on strategic thinking: (1) the “environment” school and (2) the “core competences” school, and present the eforces ontology that considers business strategy as a positioning problem in a complex environment. We illustrate the practical use and reasoning capabilities of the eforces ontology by using a case study in the Dutch aviation industry.