Modeling Framework for E-Business Systems

Abstract

Use of internet technologies has expanded rapidly from the initial profitoriented commercial systems to wide ranging business systems including administrative, governmental, non-profit oriented businesses, etc., which include intra-organizational and inter-organizational systems (IOS). All these systems are broadly referred as e-Business (e-Biz) Systems in this work. e-Biz systems are developed based on strategic alliances among the participating business systems to exploit the IT(information technology)-driven synergies. Emphasis in the traditional systems development methodologies is on process models, data models, event models, etc. of the business system under study where as in an e-Business system the emphasis is on modeling the strategic alliances between business systems and the integration architecture, and thus necessitating the need to model the strategic dependencies and relationships. Currente-Biz system development tools assume that the changes that are being caused by the technology to business systems’ goals and objectives, and nature and scope, are well understood, analyzed and documented ready for implementation by the developer. This assumption is not true. There is a requirement for an e-Biz system modeling methodology which facilitates modeling the strategic relationships, goals and objectives of partners of an eBusiness system, and which helps convert the conceptual strategic model to an implementation-oriented model. In this paper, an effort is made to develop such a methodology and demonstrate it using a case study.