Service-oriented business models: Service as value logic

This post is part of a series that explores service-oriented business models based on different perspectives on service.

Successful firms use business model innovation to rethink the way they do business and transform industries. However, current research on business model innovation is lacking theoretical underpinnings and is in need of new insights. The objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of both the business model concept and business model innovation based on service logic as foundation for customer value and value creation.

We present and discuss a rationale for business models based on ‘service logic’ with service as a value-supporting process and compared it with a business model based on ‘goods logic’ with goods as value-supporting resources. The implications for each of the business model dimensions: customer, value proposition, organizational architecture and revenue model, are described and discussed in detail.

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A simple Business Model Canvas example – The library

Looking for a simple example to learn and teach the Business model Canvas that is not too MBA like? Why not take something familiar like a library? Easy to map out but still very insightful. See the example I included below (as far as I remember it from when I was a kid in the Netherlands).

There are lots of ways to extent this. When you want to explore the commercial side, compare it with a book shop example. Or when you want to discuss the impact of technology, discuss how an e-book library would look like.

Where do we find services in enterprise architectures?

In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured growing attention as a means to systematically consolidate and interrelate diverse IT artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support. Since the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), many attempts have been made to incorporate SOA artefacts in existing EA frameworks. Yet the approaches taken to achieve this goal differ substantially for the most commonly used EA frameworks to date.

This paper investigates and compares five widely used EA frameworks in the way they embrace the SOA paradigm. It identifies what SOA artefacts are considered to be in the respective EA frameworks and their relative position in the overall structure. The results show that services and related artefacts are far from being well-integrated constructs in current EA frameworks.

The comparison presented in this paper will support practitioners in identifying an EA framework that provides SOA support in a way that matches their requirements and will hopefully inspire the academic EA and SOA communities to work on a closer integration of these architectures.

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The morphology of service bundling settings

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of what contextual factors influence the service bundling process in an organizational setting.

Although previous literature contains insights into the mechanisms underlying bundling and the artefacts for performing the bundling task itself, the body of knowledge seems to lack a comprehensive framework for analysing the actual scenario in which the bundling process is performed. This is required as the scenario will influence the bundling method and the IT support. We address this need by designing a morphological box for analysing bundling scenarios in different organizational settings. The factors featured in the box are systematised into a set of four categories of bundling layers which we identify from reviewing literature. The two core layers in the framework are the service bundling on a type level and on an instance level (i.e. configuration).

To demonstrate the applicability and utility of the proposed morphological box, we apply it to assess the underlying differences and commonalities of two different bundling scenarios from the B2B and G2C sectors which stress the differences between bundling on a type and instance level. In addition, we identify several prospects for future research that can benefit from the proposed morphological box.

See here for more information.