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8/10/2019 Paper Summary Lozovanu M
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Stockholm University
PAPER SUMMARY
Enterprise Systems and Modelling
Student: Lozovanu Mihaela – 890511-T244
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PAPER SUMMARY
The rapid technology development in the global economy, introduces a growing number of
innovational e-business ideas. Unfortunately, many of them fail to withstand the competition and
become successful. One of the main reason for their failure is that they lack an accurate description
from the beginning. An in-depth analysis is needed to understand better, to avoid ambiguities and to
make it more precisely. Gordjin (2004) presents an ontological approach to design a business idea,called the e3value ontology. This ontology provides instruments for analyzing the production,
distribution and consumption of economic value objects through a network.
The e3value ontology is used for exploring innovative e-business ideas. The main goals of
the ontology is to create a common understanding of e-business cases by the actors involved and to
be able to evaluate it from a profit value perspective. The ontology provides concepts and relations
which are understood in the same way by all enterprises involved. To model the network of
enterprises, the e3value ontology borrows terminology from business sciences.
The e3value ontology is based on the principle of reciprocity, actors create and offer objects
of economic value and get other objects in return. Gordjin (2004) presents a division of theontology into three viewpoints: global actor viewpoint, detailed actor viewpoint and value activity
viewpoint.
The global actor viewpoint consists of all actors involved in the business idea and the
objects of economic value consumed. To describe it, e3value ontology introduces several concepts.
An actor is an economically independent entity involved in a value exchange process. Actors
exchange value objects, which are valuable to one or more actors involved in the business network.
To interconnect actors so that they were able to exchange value objects, value ports are used. The
aim of the value ports is to focus on the actor’s external connection with other entities. The value
offered to or requested from the environment are represented by value offerings. They may consist
of several value objects to be exchanged, which means that the actors may exchange objects only in
combinations. “A value interface, in most cases, groups one in-going and one out-going value
offering” (Gordjin, p.8, 2004) It illustrates the economic reciprocity mechanism, showing which
value object is given in return for another. A value exchange shows which actors want to exchange
value objects with each other. Value transactions group all value exchanges that should happen or
not between two or more actors. A set of actors that assign values to objects in the same way is
called a market segment .
The detailed actor viewpoint is used to detail an actor into more actors, in order to avoid
complexity and to present the partnership between actors. To satisfy these goals, the actor concept
is divided into composite actor and elementary actor . For providing a particular service, severalactors might decide to collaborate with each other and offer objects of value jointly by using one
value interface. This partnership is called composite actor . The value exchange is used to connect
ports of composite actors and actors exchanging objects with each other.
The value activity viewpoint shows what actors do to gain profit. A value activity in this
context is a collection of operational activities which can be assigned as a whole to actors. It must
gain profit or increase the economic value for the related actors. A value exchange “connects ports
of value activities with ports of the actors which perform these activities” (Gordjin, p.17, 2004). It
can represent ports which connects an actor with a value activity and ports which connects value
activities of the same actor (internal trades).For describing more complex parts of an e-business idea, the operational scenarios are used.
For mapping them, Use Case Maps are used. They consists of three basic elements: responsibility,
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path and components. “A path is executed as a result of the receipt of an external stimulus”
(Gordjin, p.18, 2004). A responsibility point is a point where the state of the systems is changed.
Also, two well-known process modeling concepts: AND-fork and AND-join can be used to model
spawned and synchronized multiple parallel scenario paths. UCM notation can be bound to e3value
ontology, to relate scenarios paths to e3value ontology.
In conclusion, e3value contributes to a better understanding of a business model and provides concepts and relations, to analyze the potential profitability of the business model. The
three viewpoints presented, allow us to describe a business idea from different perspectives. To
prove that e3value ontology can be used to represent a wide range of business, including advanced
strategic partnership relations, a bank industry case study was modeled using e3value ontology in
the work of Kort (2006). The ontology helped to visualize the revenue structure of the partnership
and therefore it was able to understand the results of the financial analysis.
References
1. C. Kort, J. Gordijn, Modeling strategic partnerships using the e3value ontology - A field
study in the banking industry, Peter Rittgen (editor), Handbook of Ontologies for Business
Interaction, Chapter XVIII, Information Science Reference, Hershey, PA, 2007
2. J. Gordjin, “e-Business Model Ontologies”, book chapter contribution to “e-Business
Modelling Using the e3value Ontology”, Wendy Curry (editor), pages 98-128, Elsevier
Butterworth-Heinemann, UK, 2004
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