Operational Business-IT Alignment in Value Webs

Value webs are constellations of profit-and-loss responsible actors that have independent decision-making authority and that have decided to cooperate for a specific purpose. To the extent that the actors are independent, they each decide independently whether to participate in the network, and because they are profit-and-loss responsible, this decision will be based on economic sustainability of the participation. This sustainability depends on the balance between the costs and benefits of participating. The costs are generated by the coordination process and IT infrastructure required to participate; the benefits materialize in the form of commercial transactions enabled by the participation. In this paper I summarize results of recent research into conceptual modeling techniques to design economically sustainable IT-enabled value webs.