A New Ecology of Competition
For most companies today, the only truly sustainable advantage comes from out-innovating the competition.
A Framework for Exploring Digital Business Ecosystems
ICT-enabled business solutions have created a possibility for automated business relations and transactions. Digital business ecosystems are becoming an increasingly popular concept for modeling and building distributed systems in heterogeneous, decentralized and open environments. However, traditional economic and computing theories do not focus on digital business ecosystems as a separate form of organization and they do not provide conceptual frameworks that can be used to explore digital business ecosystems. In this paper, we present a framework for exploring digital business ecosystems developed from Zachman’s enterprise architecture. This framework serves as a structure for exploring the value network and the enterprise as part of a digital business ecosystem.
State-of-the-practice in analyzing enterprises’ business ecosystems
Business ecosystems are gaining more relevance both in research and in practice. The analysis of business ecosystems is thereby a data intense process. To better understand the current state-of-the-practice within enterprises addressing the analysis of business ecosystem we conducted an online survey asking participants about their division of labor, collection, documentation and processing of business ecosystem related data. 52 experts from mainly German based companies completed the questionnaire stating, inter alia, that the main data sources in use are internal company information sources and online search engines, and additionally that the time-consuming process of collecting and documenting business ecosystem related information is perceived as a major challenge in the context of business ecosystem analysis.
Towards a Visual Language Approach for Modeling Business Ecosystems
Enterprises develop, produce, and distribute their products and services nowadays in complex and increasingly digital business ecosystems consisting of business partners, suppliers, competitors, start-ups, public institutions, and costumers. These business ecosystems exhibit a high dynamic: new actors enter and leave the ecosystem continuously. Thus, for enterprise business and IT strategy the knowledge about and active design of the business ecosystems are gaining more relevance. Various stakeholders within the enterprise need to collaborate to achieve a holistic understanding of the ecosystem, all with different requirements towards the ecosystem model. As visualizations have proven to support stakeholders in fulfilling their ecosystem related tasks, the aim of this research project is the modeling and visualizing of business ecosystems addressing the identified challenges.
From Enterprise Architecture to Business Ecosystem Architecture: Stages and challenges for extending architectures beyond organizational boundaries
Today, Enterprises act in an increasingly interconnected world and in different kinds of collaborative networks. They are part of business ecosystems in which they interact with their customers, partners and competitors. The processes of analyzing and planning the intertwinement of business and IT architecture within enterprises has been successfully supported by enterprise architecture management (EAM) approaches. In this paper, we analyze four cases from different industries (health care, logistics, retail, and education) and argue that the intra-organizational concepts of enterprise architectures (EA) and EAM need to be extended to grasp the challenges of the enterprises’ interconnectedness. Beyond the known concepts of extended enterprise architecture and federated architectures, we define five stages of extended architectures. Additionally, we describe challenges and existing solutions, which are relevant for this extended perspective.
Building Digital Ecosystem Architectures
The design of digital solutions has become a pressing concern for practitioners faced with a plethora of technology impacting their business. From cloud computing to social networks, mobile computing and big data, to the emerging of Internet of things, all of which are changing how enterprise products, services, rooms and buildings are connected to the wider ecosystem of networks and services. This book defines digital ecosystems with examples from real industry cases and explores how enterprise architecture is evolving to enable physical and virtual, social, and material object collaboration and experience. The key topics covered include: Concepts of digitization Types of technological ecosystems Architecting digital workspaces Principles of architecture design Examples architecting digital business models Examples of digital design patterns Methods of monetization