Modeling and Analyzing Digital Business Ecosystems: An Approach and Evaluation

Joint actions with other businesses are key to the survival of many companies today. Advanced collaboration technologies support companies in synchronizing their joint actions by forming digital business ecosystems (DBE). While such technologies are beneficial to companies, their use might also be potentially detrimental due to the increased complexity they add to the management of the BDE partners' collaboration and due to the partners' lack of knowledge in coping with this complexity. For companies to deal with the complexities in their dynamic environments, they need approaches for mapping out and analyzing their DBEs. Due to the newness of the DBE concept, how to model and analyze DBEs is hardly known. Yet, this is necessary, as partners in a DBEs want to know if their DBEs promotes or prohibits profit. This article proposes an approach to modelling and analyzing DBEs, based on the complimentary use of ArchiMate standards and quantitative methods such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process and linear programming. We carried out a first evaluation of the proposed approach by using an expert panel of practitioners. Our results indicate that the approach is easy to use from practitioner's perspective and that it can assist practitioners in executing their modelling and analysis tasks. However, more empirical evaluation research is needed in order to improve the approach's applicability in supporting companies in making DBE-related decisions.