Suratno, B.

Evaluation

A DSR artifact should be able to show its validity and utility. Therefore, three activities were conducted to evaluate SDBMOM. The evaluation of "validity" comprised of two activities. First, we aimed at evaluating if the output generated through the application of SDBMOM (i.e., conceptual process model/business service composition) can indeed be taken as input for the development of a process-aware information system. As a result, this step went through Level-2 by extending the model into an executable process model (using Camunda Modeler), and Level-3 by implementing it in a business process management system (BPMS) platform (i.e., Camunda platform supported with Intellij Idea coding assistant). Second, we applied the SDBMOM in two real-life business cases (i.e., Free Ride Amsterdam event and Just-in-Time Present of Elderly). Thus, the second activity involved Level-1 operationalization (i.e., the scope of SDBMOM), to show that the method can be applied in real-life business cases to generate usable outputs in the form of business process models. The third activity was to evaluate the ‘utility’ of SDBMOM. Semi-structured interviews with 10 industry experts were conducted in 8 sessions. During the interviews, the experts were presented the SDBMOM, and how it has been applied in 2 real-business cases, and asked for their view on its utility. At the end of each interview session, the experts were asked to fill in a questionnaire that was developed following the TAM constructs (namely: perceived usefulness, perceived ease to use, and intention to use). The interviews were recorded, and the resulting recordings were analyzed using content analysis technique. The results obtained from the analysis of the expert interviews support the responses gathered through the questionnaire. Despite the challenges regarding the ease of use, the responses from the experts indicate that they found the method useful and they had intentions to use it. In addition to the utility and other attributes (i.e., completeness, complexity, clarity, traceability, and consistency), the analysis also revealed that experts associated the SDBMOM with such terms as the customer centricity, network centricity, capability-driven nature, clarity of roles, and use of the choreography.

7 Conclusions

In this concluding chapter, we first briefly present the contributions of this research by going through the research questions that drove this work. Next, we discuss the limitations of the study and future work that can be undertaken to further extend the research.

7.1 Contributions to Research and Practice

The research presented in this thesis has been guided by the following main research question: “How can we facilitate the operationalization of service-dominant business models into conceptual business processes in the form of business service compositions given a set of business services?”

In this research, we address this question with the Service-Dominant Business Model Operationalization Method (SDBMOM). This method has been developed following the design science research methodology. The SDBMOM comprises three essential components: conceptual underpinnings, step-wise method, and relevant role definitions. In the following, we summarize our contributions to research and practice by going through the (sub)questions that have been derived from the main research question.

7.1.1 Research gaps in the operationalization of service-dominant business models

The first research question (RQ.1) is posed to identify the aspects of business model operationalization that have already been addressed in the existing academic literature and the research gaps that remain to be covered. In order to address this question, we examined the background on business models and service-dominant logic, and conducted a systematic literature review in the academic literature on the concept of business model operationalization (BMO). Our findings indicate a lack of foundational conceptualization in the BMO field that establishes the associations between the theories, views and tools of business research domains to those of the process management and IS domains. In addition, whilst the plethora of research on business models and relevant tools, only a handful of works consider the multi-stakeholder perspective in a service-dominant context, and none explicitly address the need for their operationalization. Moreover, although the current research on BMO acknowledges the role of business processes within the business model transformation process, existing methods address operationalization only in the software design and development context and do not elaborate on business processes as a core element of information systems that enable business models. There signifies a need to explicitly relate the elements of business models and business processes for their traceability. This contribution not only guided the definition of solutions objectives to be addressed by the method proposed in this research work, but also provides a comprehensive source that offers pointers for gaps to be fulfilled by future research studies. In the time of writing of this thesis, there was no research in the academia that provide a comprehensive list of approaches used for business model design together with the methods used for their operationalization in different contexts.

7.1.2 Conceptual foundation for the service-dominant business model operationalization

The second research question (RQ.2) addresses the need to establish the conceptual underpinnings of the proposed method by defining the core concepts and their relationships that are deemed essential for the operationalization of service-dominant business models. This is also reflected as one of the five objectives of the proposed method (Obj-2). This is to ensure that the proposed method fosters a common understanding of the core concepts, and effective and repeatable application in practice. This is particularly important, as the underlying concepts are typically referred to in diverse research disciplines, such as service science, service systems engineering, business process management, and information systems. To address this need, we defined a set of core concepts - based on the literature on these disciplines-, that includes service-dominant business model (SDBM) and radar (SDBM/R), business service, business service operation, customer-service scenario, business service composition, conceptual process model and their formal relationships to lay the foundations upon which the proposed method is built. Clear definitions of these concepts and explicit definitions of their interrelationships would help to establish a common understanding of these terms and to advance the research in this field.

7.1.3 A method for the operationalization of service-dominant business models (SDBMOM)

Based on the research gaps identified through the literature review, and the background on service-dominant business and business engineering, five design objectives have been defined to be addressed by SDBMOM. As discussed in 7.1.2 the second design objective relates to the conceptual foundation that is necessary for the proposed method. In the following, we organize and explain our contributions in this direction with respect to the remaining four objectives.

Objective-1: The method should support taking a service-dominant business model as input for operationalization. This entails a multi-stakeholder model where the customer is also involved in the proposed value co-creation. Our artefact, SDBMOM, takes a multi-actor business model - represented as a Service-Dominant Business Model Radar (SDBM/R) blueprint - and it’s associated Customer Service Scenario as primary inputs, together with a catalogue of business services as given inputs of the method. The application of the method results in conceptual process models that delineate the operational scopes for each actor in the form of individual processes as implied by the model and the customer service scenario. Thus, SDBMOM can effectively be used to operationalize service-dominant business models as represented in SDMB/R blueprints. Furthermore, the operational processes generated by the method do not stand as isolate objects but are conceptually linked to the BASE/X business engineering framework thanks to the service dominant conceptual underpinnings that it builds on. These underpinnings define and relate the concepts of the method to those of the business engineering framework. As a result, the operational process models can effectively represent the artifacts of the operational perspective of a business model in concert with the macro or strategic perspective. The accomplishment of this objective has been confirmed by experts, in particular with the evidence that supports the completeness of the method.

Objective-2: Build the method upon conceptual foundations for BMO. SDBMOM is built upon the BMO concepts and their associations, hence conceptual underpinnings for BMO, which were addressed by the second research question (RQ.2). SDBMOM relies on this set of constituent BMO elements defined from a service dominant perspective. It takes them into account in conceptualizing the inputs and outputs of the method, as well as in contextualizing the environment for SDBMOM use. This helps improve the common understanding of the method, the assets that are required and generated by method execution and their tractability, and its effective and repeatable application in practice.

Objective-3: The method should enable the composition of services of multiple parties involved in the business model. In addition, the output of operationalization should be a technology-agnostic in order to allow for subsequent operationalization levels to apply the most suitable technology that is relevant and applicable for the specific context. SDBMOM employs standard BPMN v2 conceptual process modelling elements for representing the intermediate and final outputs of the operationalization steps defined in the method. BPMN is a technology-agnostic language that has been commonly adopted in practice. SDBMOM delineates the operational scope for each value co-creating actor in the form of conceptual process models serving as a specification for its executable processes to be supported by information systems. On the other hand, many technology providers, in particular workflow management system (WfMS) vendors or more advanced business process management system (BPMS) vendors take conceptual and executable BPMN models as main inputs for information systems development. In our artifact evaluation, we have demonstrated how the process models generated by SDBMOM can seamlessly be further completed with execution-oriented details and implemented on a BPMS platform. Such conceptual process models can also be used for the evaluation of business models before they are implemented as process aware information systems. For instance, process simulations can be used to quantitatively predict the operational performance of the designed process (and thereby of the business model) [1]. Process model driven development provides many opportunities for SDBMOM users to operationalize their business models also in the form of information systems, taking SDBMOM conceptual process models as input. This attribute is also well-confirmed in expert evaluations, highlighting the backward traceability of the operational process models and forward traceability of the business models, and their consistency in general.

Objective-4: The method should offer a step-by-step iterative guide for the operationalization of the business model and should enable explicit traceability between inputs, outputs and all intermediate models. SDBMOM follows a bi-focal business model operationalization approach. In the first focus, it concentrates on the decomposition of SDBM/R blueprints into the elements of multi-actor operational process models. The second focus maintains the traceability of the intermediate and final outputs from each decomposition step and thus maps them to the elements of service dominant concepts manifested in conceptual underpinnings. This way, it aims to maintain the emergent characteristics of the business model, such as co-production activities, interactions and their association to business services, so that the SDBM/R value propositions hold and ultimately the desired value-in-use can be created for the customer of the business model. To help ensure traceability and consistency, control checklists are included after each method step to guide SDBMOM users.

Objective-5: To support its application in real-life business settings the method should include an organizational structure that describes the (organizational) roles that are expected to be involved in the application of the method, including their responsibilities and necessary skills. As with the design of business models, their operationalization does not happen in a vacuum: it is performed in a specific business context. In order to facilitate the adoption of SDBMOM in real-life settings, we have defined a number of business engineering roles with related responsibilities and skills, and mapped them to the corresponding SDBMOM activities. The evaluation activities that comprised the application of the method in real-life business cases and expert interviews have confirmed the validity and utility of the SDBMOM in this respect. The SDBMOM and its conceptual foundation provide a concrete basis for researchers and practitioners who aim to apply business modeling concepts to engineer service-dominant business for implementing innovative solutions enabled by multiple stakeholders. These contributions should be considered as further steps to align business goals and models to the concepts relevant to business operations and supporting technology. Establishing explicit traceability between these business concepts is significant for effective business-IT alignment [4]. The SDBMOM has been designed as a pragmatic approach that can help practitioners to quickly design and implement their new solutions to the market, or rethink their existing value propositions and redesign their offerings.

7.2 Limitations and Future Research Directions

The research presented in this thesis forms a coherent whole of results, achieved by following a well-defined design science research methodology. Given the fact that this work presents a novel approach to the operationalization of service-dominant business models, there is a number of limitations to this work, however. These limitations imply directions for future work to reduce or eliminate these limitations. We discuss this below, organized in a number of topics.

Applicability to other service-dominant business engineering approaches
SDBMOM takes SDBM/R blueprints as explicit inputs. It relies on the core concepts of the BASE/X business engineering framework that it builds upon. It is specifically catered for the operationalization of service-dominant business models represented as SDBM/R blueprints (with customer service scenarios). Therefore, its effectiveness in operationalizing SDBMs that are represented using other approaches (as discussed in Chapter 2 of this thesis) has not been evaluated and, hence, is undetermined.

Quality and availability of SDBMOM inputs
Related to the abovementioned limitation is that the level of effectiveness that can be achieved in operationalizing SDBMs depends strongly on the quality of the artefacts that it requires as input. Incomplete and inconsistent inputs would hamper its applicability. Future work in this direction that addresses the applicability in practice is the specification of quality criteria for each of these inputs. The SDBMOM also assumes that the network parties collaborating in a service-dominant business model already have a well-structured business service catalogue in place that can be used as input for the operationalization, and hence for the composition of these services. However, given the importance of this assumptions, more research is required on the methods and frameworks that can be used by organizations in defining and managing their business services and maintaining them in the form of business service catalogues. This research is located at another level of service-dominant business engineering, though. At the time of writing of this thesis, it is addressed by a companion research project to the one presented in this thesis.

Applicability in other business domains
We have applied the method in an illustrative business scenario and two real-life business cases that originate in the mobility domain. Although these cases can be considered generic, we currently have no evidence that the method can be effectively applied in business models that originate in other business domains. Therefore, future work should consider applying the method for the operationalization of SDBMs that have emerged in diverse business domains. This will strengthen our conclusions regarding its generalizability and validity. Existing work on the application of service-dominant business model engineering in other business domains (such as smart logistics from the BESTFACT project [131] and advanced manufacturing from the HORSE project) can provide a good starting point for this.

Completeness of evaluation
For evaluating the utility of SDBMOM, we have interviewed experts from different business domains. In the interviews, we have demonstrated the use of the method and have investigated the view of the experts on the usefulness and ease-of-use of the method. Given limitations in throughput time of the project and availability of the experts, there was no room for having the experts work with SDBMOM themselves, i.e., have them develop business processes from business models themselves. Consequently, future work should incorporate additional evaluation activities where industry practitioners are asked to use the method themselves for the operationalization of their SDBMs. This would not only provide additional feedback regarding the ease-of-use of the method but also additional guidelines for strengthening its utility.

Completeness of structured literature review
Finally, there are also limitations regarding the structured literature review that we performed to review the contributions in the relevant research domain. A common validity threat to all literature reviews is the completeness, i.e., not being able to locate all relevant studies. To mitigate this risk two measures were taken. First, we have performed an exhaustive research on a considerable number of well-known digital libraries that are frequently used in systemic reviews. We consider that they have sufficient coverage on the topics under investigation. The second measure relates to the definition of the search terms and the structure of the query. We have based keyword selection on the discussions among researchers and other related secondary studies. Other than the keyword “business model” there was only one block of keywords joined with an OR-construct retrieving more papers at a cost of precision. We tackled the precision problem by adding further inclusion and exclusion criteria such as imposing restrictions on fields of research. Due to these measures, we consider that our search terms sufficiently capture an extensive set of relevant papers addressing the subject. A limitation regarding the literature review also exists due to the used exclusion criteria. For reasons of quality control, we have excluded white papers, grey publications and non-academic books. However, given the practical nature of the topic, such sources may provide useful insight into the approaches or techniques that are currently not covered or reported in the scientific literature. Future work can consider conducting a multi-focal review of the academic and grey literature to reflect also the state of practice.