Process-Driven Business Model Analysis and Adaptation: Reference Model for the Software Industry

The concept of business models has increasingly attracted interest in research and practice during the last decades. Particularly software companies undergo continuous digital transformation that is driven by innovations like Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence or Cloud Computing, which have an impact on the disruption of their business models. For companies in the highly agile software industry, a thorough understanding of the core business model components and the impact of processes on strategic decisions defined in the business model is key for their success.

This book develops a reference model that links value creating processes in the software industry to the elements of software business models. The reference model consists of a Software Business Model Ontology that describes the core business model components in the software industry and their mutual relationships. The business model elements are semantically linked to the value creating processes in the software industry by assigning process performance indicators, which enables the estimation of the impact of critical processes on the linked business model elements. The practical applicability of the reference model has been demonstrated with the prototypical implementation of an application system that enables the derivation of recommendations for business model adaptation based on process information.

Academia and practice benefit from new use cases through the formalization and semantic linking of business model components and process artifacts in order to estimate the impact of process executions on the underlying business model.