Towards a Strategy-Oriented Value Modeling Language: Identifying Strategic Elements of the VDML Meta-model

Abstract

Abstract. The concept of value is increasingly important in organizations. This has led to the creation of value models that capture internal value creation and the external exchange of value between the company and its value network. To facilitate strategic alignment, the meta-model specification of value modeling languages should both fully reflect the strategic choices of a company and define 'what' a company must do to realize value creation. In this paper, the Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML) meta-model elements are assessed by applying these two requirements. The resulting strategy-oriented VDML metamodel perspective is obtained by applying the Design Science methodology, which also includes the use of a case example to demonstrate its utility. Keywords: value model, strategy orientation, business model, VDML IntroductionValue modeling gets increasing attention in the field of Conceptual Modeling. These modeling techniques can be used to represent the internal creation of value and the exchange of value between the organization and its external value network. This focus on value creation and exchange is particularly relevant for the alignment of the strategic and the operational layer of the business architecture [1,2]. Value models can bridge the conceptual gap that exists between strategy formulation, as specified by goal modeling, and the operationalization of a strategy, which is addressed by process models [1,3,4]. To this end, value models should represent strategy implementation choices.As of yet, it has not been investigated whether the current value modeling languages capture strategy implementation, which results in the development of ad-hoc models with a limited strategic modeling scope (see also section 2.2). Consequently, the current value models are not able to effectively support strategic alignment.To solve this gap, this paper proposes two requirements for value models, i.e., (1) fully reflecting the strategic choices made by the company (i.e., the completeness requirement) and (2) using concepts that describe 'what' a company must do to create value for itself and its environment, without committing to the required operational details (i.e., the strategy implementation depth requirement). These requirements are derived from the business model literature in Management and Organization Science, which is concerned with the strategic logic of an organization, i.e., what a company must do to create value for itself and its stakeholders. As both value modeling and business

The Development and Experimental Evaluation of a Focused Business Model Representation

“…This paper finishes the development of a focused BM representation. Previous research already identified the components of a BM (Roelens and Poels 2013b) and investigated whether relevant enterprise modeling languages capture these components (Roelens and Poels 2013a). This resulted in a set of VDML meta-model constructs that cover the complete BM.…”

“…Afterwards enterprise modeling languages (i.e., the REA value chain and value system specification, VNA, capability maps, e 3 -value, e 3 -forces, and VDML) that are used for representing BMs, were reviewed (Roelens and Poels 2013a). It was analyzed which components of the framework were covered by these representations.…”

“…8). In a value stream diagram, organizational processes are represented by CapabilityMethods as previous work indicates that this construct is most suitable for representing processes in the context of BMs (Roelens and Poels 2013a). This includes the use of the corresponding InputPort and OutputPort visualizations to model the inflow and outflow of BusinessItems.…”

“…The identification of the BM components was realized by previous work (Roelens and Poels 2013b), in which a framework is proposed based on existing integration efforts about the constituent BM components. Subsequent research identified the meta-model constructs of the value delivery modeling language (VDML) that are needed to represent these components (Roelens and Poels 2013a). VDML (OMG 2014) is our choice of representation language as it is proposed as a standard for enterprise modeling that can be used to provide a complete BM representation.…”