2017

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The Cambridge Business Model Innovation Process

Organisations increasingly understand that meeting their sustainability ambitions does not only require new technologies, but innovation on the business model level. To facilitate the design of more sustainable business models, a range of new tools and techniques have been developed. While this resulted in the design of a wide range of promising business models, only very few are successfully implemented. The Cambridge Business Model Innovation Process is a framework developed to guide organisations’ business model innovation efforts and map the necessary activities and potential challenges. In this paper, we introduce the framework and present an exploratory attempt of applying it to a social start-up. The preliminary result of this experience led us to build a comprehensive research agenda that aims at developing tools and processes to help organisations in bridging the design-implementation gap in sustainable business model innovation.

An Explanatory Study on the Co-evolutionary Mechanisms of Business IT Alignment

Business IT Alignment is considered an enduring topic in academic and practitioners’ literature. The interest in the subject is justified by the link, demonstrated by several studies, between alignment and corporate performances. However, alignment research has not yet been translated into practices, theoretically demonstrated in literature and applied to companies. The interpretation of alignment as a function of independent factors and the underestimation of the complex nature of alignment process are considered key barriers in alignment achievement. The present study is based on a multi-case study analysis carried out in two companies that implemented alignment processes. We conceptualise alignment as a co-evolution process and derive four mechanisms and three types of parameters and explain their role in alignment implementation. The contribution is theoretical, since we analyse and describe mechanisms and factors that govern alignment, and for the practitioners, since knowledge of these mechanisms is precondition for an effective alignment implementation.

An interoperability assessment approach based on criteria dependencies to support decision making in networked enterprises

In the networked enterprise, the interoperability is seen as a requirement for ensuring the collaboration among partners. Therefore, an assessment for identifying the enterprise’s strengths and weakness regarding interoperability is paramount. It involves determining the gaps between where enterprises envision themselves in the future and the enterprises’ current states. Indeed, a variety of approaches were proposed in the literature. However, based on surveys, existing methods are assessing specific aspects of interoperability and focusing only on one kind of measurement. The objective of this work is, therefore, to propose a holistic assessment approach to support the interoperability development. To do so, the criteria regarding the interoperability aspects and measurements were identified and are being formalised. The enterprise systems associated with the criteria are being modelled based on Enterprise Architecture techniques. This modelling supports the identification of existing interdependencies between criteria. Finally, case studies will be used to validate the proposed approach.

IT4IT as a Management of Technology framework: Perspectives, implications and contributions

Information technology (IT) is at the core of digitisation of existing business models and dominates in the innovation efforts of many industries. IT has until now in many ways been regarded as exempted from the structuration and automation represented by IT. The IT4IT framework released by The Open Group in October 2015 suggests to a major change. IT has to be governed and structured along defined processes of value chains, life-cycles, service propositions, customer interaction and cost control as any other area of the organization. The purpose of this paper is to review IT4IT as a practical implementation of a Management of Technology framework and to review its perspectives and implications to the MoT society as well as the contributions it has to IT professionals, innovators and MoT practitioners. Methodologically this paper is based on an extensive case study of a large IT service provider. The IT service provider used the framework, along with other frameworks, to introduce larger degree of homogeneity of its own service “catalogues”, improved processes for navigating in the heterogeneity of its customers, and to ensure uniform processes of performance management and reporting. Methodologically this paper has been challenged by the novelty of the topic of IT4IT as only very little peer reviewed materials is available

A First Literature Review On Enterprise Reference Architecture

Enterprise Reference Architectures have been increasingly emerging as new standardized architectural description artefacts suitable to provide a frame of reference for a particular business domains. Used in an appropriate way, they can be a useful tool for improving enterprise architecture management practices. Whilst from a practitioners perspective several instances of such architectures have been created over the past years, little research on such artefacts has been done to date. Hence, academia still lacks a comprehensible overview of prior literature on Enterprise Reference Architectures, despite the relevance of literature reviews to knowledge advancement in any scientific field. To close this gap, in this paper we present a primer literature review on Enterprise Reference Architectures conducted following general guidelines proposed for undertaking information systems reviews. Similarly to precedent contributions addressing enterprise architecture oriented topics, we introduce a novel classification framework based on Gregor‘s theory types of information systems to structure and summarize former research. Major findings from significant studies on the topic are then identified, analysed and mapped into the referred framework. Based on the analysis and results of the review, brief suggestions to stimulate further research on the design, improvement and application of Enterprise Reference Architectures are also derived.

A Case Study of Stakeholder Concerns on EAM

As a result of growing complexities in business processes, information systems, and the technical infrastructure, a key challenge for enterprise architecture management (EAM) is to guide stakeholders from different hierarchical levels with heterogeneous concerns. EA deliverables, such as models or frameworks, are often highly comprehensive and standardized. However, these can hardly be applied without greater adaption. Although the literature selectively covers approaches for tailoring EA deliverables closer to the concerns of affected stakeholders, these approaches are often vague or not very differentiated. In the paper at hand, we aim at introducing a stakeholder perspective to EAM research that considers stakeholder concerns on EAM across hierarchical levels. To this end, we conduct a case study: Our results show homogenous concerns among stakeholders on EA deliverables. In turn, we found different concerns on the role of EAM in applying these deliverables, dependent on the hierarchical level of stakeholders. These findings stress the necessity for a more differentiated understanding of stakeholder concerns on EAM. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for an exemplary EAM approach.