Designing and evaluating e-business models

must create the e-business information systems. This article presents a conceptual modeling approach to e-business—called e3-value—that is designed to help define how economic value is created and exchanged within a network of actors. Doing e-business well requires the formulation of an e-business model that will serve as the first step in requirements analysis for e-business information systems. The industry currently lacks adequate methods for formulating these kinds of requirements. Methods from the IT systems analysis domain generally have a strong technology bias and typically do not reflect business considerations very well. Meanwhile, approaches from the business sciences often lack the rigor needed for information systems development. A tighter integration of business and IT modeling would most certainly benefit the industry, because the integration of business and IT systems is already a distinct feature of e-business. This article shows some ways to achieve this kind of modeling integration. Our e3-value method is based on an economic valueoriented ontology that specifies what an e-business model is made of. In particular, it entails defining, deriving, and analyzing multi-enterprise relationships, e-business scenarios, and operations requirements in both qualitative and quantitative ways. Our e3-value approach offers distinct advantages over traditional nonintegrated modeling techniques. These advantages include better communication about the essentials of an e-business model and a more complete understanding of e-business operations and systems requirements through scenario analysis and quantification.1 The value viewpoint Requirements engineering entails information systems analysis from several distinct perspectives. Figure 1 shows what requirements perspectives are relevant to e-business design: the articulation of the economic value proposition (the e-business model), the layout of business processes that “operationalize” the e-business model, and the IT systems architecture that enables and supports the e-business processes. These perspectives provide a separation of concerns and help manage the complexity of requirements and design. Our emphasis on “the value viewpoint” is a distinguishing feature of our approach. There are already several good ways to represent business process and IT architectural models, but the industry lacks effective techniques to express and analyze the value viewpoint. We illustrate the use of the e3-value methodology with one of the e-business projects where we successfully applied our approach: provisioning a valueadded news service. A newspaper, which we call the Amsterdam Times for the sake of the example, wants to offer to all its subscribers the ability to read articles online. But the newspaper does not want to pass on any additional costs to its customers. The idea is to finance the expense by telephone connection revenues, which the reader must pay to set up a telephone connection for Internet connectivity. This can be achieved by two very different ebusiness models: the terminating model and the originating model. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate these modThis article presents