Resource analysis and classification for purpose driven value model design

Business and IT systems are today facing an ever more complex environment characterised by openness, variety, and change. In order to cope with this environmental complexity, organisations need effective instruments for managing their knowledge. Essential among these instruments are enterprise models, i.e. computational representations of the structure, processes, information, resources, and goals of organisations. When using enterprise modeling for analysing and designing business scenarios and networks, the reasoning should not start from business processes and activities but from notions at a higher level of abstraction. This can be done by focusing on the business motivation behind processes and expressing it in value models, i.e. models focusing on high level and business oriented objects like resources, actors, resource conversions, and resource exchanges. The declarative orientation of value models make them attractive for a number of different purposes, including profitability analysis, marketing analysis, process design, and service analysis. As value models can be used for many different purposes, there is a risk that they will become overloaded, complex, and difficult to understand. Therefore, when designing a value model, its purpose should be explicitly stated in order to focus the analysis. The goal of this article is to show how the purpose of a value model should influence its design. The approach builds on an analysis and classification of resources, resource conversions, and resource exchanges.