Paper Summary Lozovanu M

8/10/2019 Paper Summary Lozovanu M

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Stockholm University

PAPER SUMMARY

Enterprise Systems and Modelling

Student: Lozovanu Mihaela – 890511-T244



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,



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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Paper Summary Lozovanu M