BUSINESS MODELS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Marten van Sinderen
University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, Enschede, The Netherlands
Keywords: Business models, Information systems, Goal modelling, Value modelling, Model-driven development,
Sustainable development.
Abstract: Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus
contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and
innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business
modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect,
namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can
be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be
taken into account when extending existing work.
1 INTRODUCTION
The IT-driven globalization has changed business
and its underlying economic concepts (Friedman
2007). Also, people start to realize that consumption,
financial profits and material ownership are not
always positively correlated to well-being. A new
paradigm for business and economics is needed, one
which emphasizes sustainable development, where
ecological, social and psychological dimensions of
economic activity are recognized (Tideman 2005).
This new paradigm will give quality of life a more
central role. Although measurable indicators for
sustainable development and quality of life are hard
to define, business organizations will play an
important role in shaping and testing it in practice.
While business may have significantly contributed
to the problem, companies to date are definitely
considering sustainability issues, be it for reasons of
governmental regulation, public image or genuine
concern.
Thus, business organizations will explore market
opportunities and thus exert activities that are
potential solutions to the challenges of sustainable
development, including reducing poverty, enhancing
livelihoods, protecting ecosystems and tackling
climate change (Wilson 2009). They have to invest
in and rely on business models and information
systems to be able to rationally and effectively
address these challenges.
Business models specify how companies achieve
their goals and realize a value proposition to their
customers. Sustainable development at this level
implies that not only economical aspects are taken
into consideration when designing business
processes, but social and environmental aspects as
well. At the technical level, information systems
(partially) automate the business processes. The
design of information systems for sustainability
should be optimized not only for delivering
economic value, but also for providing social and
environmental benefits. Figure 1 shows the role of
business models and information systems in
achieving a sustainable and balanced trade-off
between economic, social and environmental
aspects, both for individual business organizations as
well as for business networks in which multiple
business organizations collaborate.
Examples of areas where business models and
information systems can be applied for sustainable
development include smart energy grids (Ipakchi
2009, Warmer 2009), energy-efficient buildings and
spaces for public use (Sinderen 2010, Teherian
2010), energy-positive neighborhoods (Lopez 2011),
and low carbon mobility and freight transport
(Banister 2007, Steenwijk 2011).
177
van Sinderen M.
BUSINESS MODELS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.
DOI: 10.5220/0004460001770181
In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2011), pages 177-181
ISBN: 978-989-8425-68-3
Copyright
c
 2011 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

Enterprise
(Business
organization or
business
network)
employs
implements
determines
value
proposition of
partially automates
Goals
and benefits:
- economic
- social
- environmental
delivers trade-off between
Information
system
Business
model
Figure 1: Role of business models and information systems in sustainability development.
We identify two important challenges related to
sustainable development, which are of particular
interest to the business modeling and software
design community:
1. Goal and value modeling;
2. Model-driven development.
In the remaining of this paper we briefly explore
these two topics. We mention existing work that can
be taken as a starting point for addressing
sustainability issues, and we make some
observations that may be taken into account when
extending existing work.
2 GOAL AND VALUE MODELING
Business models should be able to represent and
enable reasoning about the goals and benefits of
sustainable development. Trade-offs between the
economic, social and environmental aspects of
sustainable development goals need to be addressed
(Wilson 2009). Goals of an enterprise lead to a value
proposition to the enterprise’s customers, which is
expected to induce value exchanges between the
enterprise and its customers. Value in this context
can be anything worth in usefulness or importance to
the stakeholders, ranging from money, goods,
services (economic benefits), and equality, justice,
liberty (social benefits), to a balanced ecosystem and
stable climate (environmental benefits).
If the enterprise is a business network in which
business partners collaborate, then the business
partners have mutual value propositions and value
exchanges between each other, in addition to value
propositions to and value exchanges with customers.
Assuming that all partners are essential for the
collaboration, the success of the collaboration will
depend on the achievement of a net value (profit or
other benefit) for each of the partners. Also, in
general, partners want a fair distribution of the
overall net value of the collaboration, i.e., no partner
should have disproportionate benefits considering
his efforts spent and risks taken.
Enterprises are complex systems, hence creating
models of such systems in order to understand and
analyze their properties normally requires a
structured, or multi-viewpoint, approach.
Sustainability is one of these properties, which, as
we have seen, can be related to multifaceted goals
and values. Several techniques exist for goal and
value modeling. A well-known approach to
problem-oriented goal modeling is goal oriented
requirements engineering (GORE), with techniques
such as i* (Yu 1997) and KAOS (Dardenne 1993).
A more recent development is ARMOR (Quartel
2009), which has the important benefit of being
aligned with a standard enterprise modeling
language, namely ArchiMate (TOG 2009). The most
popular technique for value modeling is e3value
(Gordijn 2002). The combined use of goal and value
models has been explored in several works,
including (Gordijn 2006, Mantovaneli 2009).
However, none of the approaches and techniques
explicitly addresses sustainability, and how
economic, social and environmental aspects can be
traded and balanced to allow sustainable
development.
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Therefore, an important challenge is to extend
business modeling, possibly based on current goal
and value modeling techniques, but specifically
targeted to sustainability. Such extensions may take
account of the following observations:
 Trust is an important lubricant for business
collaboration. Without a sufficient level of trust
among potential partners, collaboration will not take
place. Moreover, discovery of misplaced trust in a
partner will lead to exclusion of that partner, and
possibly to disintegration of the collaboration if the
partner cannot be replaced. Initial work on trust and
value modeling is reported in (Fatemi 2011a). We
expect that a business organization can procreate
trust from its potential business partners if it shows
to respect or embrace similar values, particularly
with respect to social and environmental benefits.
 Local communities maybe easier to involve in
building partnerships than remote communities.
Availability of background knowledge and trust
recommendations plays a role in this, as well as
similarity in culture and mutual understanding of
values. Moreover, elimination of travel and transport
may contribute to reduction of environmental
impact.
 Personalization of business offerings to customers
is an important factor of reinforcing customer
relationships (Marca 2011). Customers are more
interested if they feel that their needs and beliefs are
taken seriously and if they can influence the value
objects in the value exchanges with business
organizations. In general, business organizations that
are context-aware, i.e., aware of their customers’
context but also of their operational context, may be
able to exploit this knowledge to save energy and
limit environmental impact.
3 MODEL-DRIVEN
DEVELOPMENT
As mentioned earlier, at the technical level,
information systems (partially) automate the
processes and activities as described or constrained
by business models. An information system will
only be effective if it correctly implements the
business models. Furthermore, maintenance of the
information system will only be viable if properties
expressed by the business models can be traced to
capabilities of information system components.
Changes to business models, e.g., triggered by
market demands, can then be addressed at the
technical level by adapting or replacing the
components that support the affected business
properties.
Model-driven development, based on the model-
driven architecture initiative of OMG (OMG 2003),
is a widely accepted approach to manage system and
software complexity and to achieve and maintain
alignment between business level models and
technology level models (Sinderen 2009). In
particular, model-driven development organizes and
relates the modeling space using a classification of
models that offer different abstractions (Frankel
2003). These abstractions cover enterprise design
and business network design together with the
development of supporting software solutions. A key
technical feature of model-driven development is the
use of model transformations to (semi-)
automatically derive ‘target’ models from ‘source’
models, where target models are typically of a lower
level of abstraction than source models.
The challenge that is posed related to model-
driven development is then: can we propose model
transformations that yield models of information
systems to support sustainability, given one or more
source business models. Given the complexity of
enterprise systems, we cannot expect that a single
transformation can be used to bridge between the
business level and the information system level.
Several approaches exist that consider
transformations starting from either goal or value
models. For example, (Mantovaneli 2009) explores
the relations between value (e3value) models and
goal (ARMOR) models; (Bandara 2004) presents an
approach that applies goal decomposition to achieve
policy refinement, using UML as high-level notation
for both goals and policies; and (Fatemi 2011b)
describes a transformation from a value (e3value)
model to a coordination process (BPMN) model
using the Groove transformation tool. The latter
transformation result could be further exploited
when targeting service-oriented information
systems. For example, (Khadka 2011) proposes a
transformation from a (CDL) model of an abstract
coordination process between services to a concrete
(BPEL) orchestration of services using the Atlas
Transformation Language.
Many more transformation approaches exist,
addressing a variety of modeling languages and
employing various transformation techniques and
tools. It is worthwhile to investigate whether
existing approaches can be extended such that
sustainability requirements can be preserved and
sustainability solutions can be optimized. The
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following observations may be taken into account
when developing model-driven sustainability:
 Reference models can be useful to guide the
transformation process. Transformations from a
higher to a lower abstraction level allow many (in
principle, an infinite number of) possible target
models given a single source model. This is because
there are many ways to add lower level details that
do not contradict the higher level properties
represented by the source model. It may be difficult
to know and formalize in advance the stakeholders’
considerations that would allow automated selection
of the ‘best’ solution. Hence, such situations would
require frequent interaction with and input from a
designer acting on behalf of the stakeholders. A
well-founded and proven architectural model to
which any target model must comply can limit the
number of possible choices considerably, thus
reducing designer interaction. For instance, (Balmus
2011) proposes a trade promotion management
reference architecture that can be used to guide
transformations of marketing business models.
 Monitoring and evaluation of sustainability
parameters should be anticipated in business models,
and should be implementation as far as possible in
the supporting information systems. Alencar Silva
(2011) presents an initial framework for configuring
monitoring strategies from business requirements. A
more elaborate framework is proposed in (Wetzstein
2011), which allows business analysts to determine
how KPIs for business process performance depend
on lower level process metrics and quality of service
(QoS) characteristics of the information system
infrastructure.
 Additional concepts may be required in languages,
both at the business and technical level, to express
properties relevant for sustainability development.
These concepts should have a careful definition of
semantics, in order to be useful in automated
transformation approaches. This is especially true at
the business level where sustainability sometimes
deals with subjective aspects of the enterprise.
Moreover, enterprises generally have several
stakeholders, involve collaboration between several
business organizations, and require the integration of
several architectural domains. The lack of a common
interpretation of modeling concepts would inhibit
model-driven development. The use of ontology-
based semantics for concepts has been proposed as a
viable approach to address this issue (Azevedo
2011). This work makes use of the Unified
Foundational Ontology (UFO) as semantic
foundation to evaluate, re-design and integrate
models of conceptual modeling languages.
Importantly for our purpose, UFO covers social and
intentional phenomena, which need to be modeled
when addressing sustainability development.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Traditional business models and information
systems must be adapted and innovated in order to
fit the new paradigm of sustainable development.
Particular challenges for the business modeling and
software design community are in the areas of goal
and value modeling and model-driven development.
We discussed the relationship between multifaceted
(i.e., economic, social, environmental) goals and
value propositions of an enterprise as a single
business organization and as a business network.
Trust, local communities and personalization present
important boundary conditions for successful
business models, and thus have to be explicitly
considered in goal and value modeling. Model-
driven development can be used to achieve and
maintain alignment between the business level
models and technology level enterprise models.
Particularly, automated model transformations are
useful tools to cope with the dynamicity of business
constellations and markets. However, current
approaches in this area do not explicitly address
sustainability. Extensions should consider the use of
reference models (especially those that address
sustainability), the need for monitoring and
evaluation of sustainability parameters, and the
definition of additional concepts with ontology-
based semantics (using a foundational ontology).
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