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by a firm from its business network are called
capabilities.
2.2 ArchiMate
ArchiMate® is a widely popular EA modeling
language, promoted by The Open Group®. It is a
lightweight and scalable modeling language which
provides an integrated architectural approach for
describing and visualizing the different architectural
domains, their underlying relations and
dependencies in a firm. (The Open Group, 2012).
The ArchiMate metamodel consist of three types
of elements, viz. active, passive and behavioral
elements. They are related in the same way as parts
of a sentence, i.e., subject (active structure element),
object (passive structure element), and a verb
(behavior element) (The Open Group, 2012). The
active element performs an action (specified by the
behavior element) on the passive element. Besides
the above classification based on role, ArchiMate
elements are also divided according to their
specialization and scope into three layers, i.e.,
Business, Application, and Technology. The
elements in the technology layer provide the
necessary infrastructure to run applications, which in
turn are used by business processes that realize the
services and products offered to the customer.
ArchiMate® also has a set of relationships to show
how the different elements interact with one another.
Many of these relationships (composition,
aggregation, association, and specialization) have
been inherited from UML, while others, like trigger,
are from business process modeling languages.
Relationships in ArchiMate® can also been ranked
with respect to their “strength” (Buuren, et al.,
2004).
At this point we ought to answer an important
question, i.e., why do we choose ArchiMate, to
model value creation? Firstly, ArchiMate has a
layered structure spanning the whole enterprise.
Thus it provides the required granularity to our
approach to model value creation at a low
abstraction level. Secondly, the supporting
infrastructure for performing the processes, i.e.,
human, IT resources, etc. is incorporated in
ArchiMate®. Thirdly, the resource and activity
components of the value creation framework aligns
well with the concept of structural and behavioral
elements in ArchiMate® metamodel, respectively.
Lastly, ArchiMate® is adopted by the Open group
and is widely used by academics and practitioners in
the field of enterprise architecture (Iacob, et al.,
2012)
2.3 e-3 Value Model
It should be kept in mind that firms may acquire
resources and activities for creating value from
partners in their business network. e-3 value
(Gordijn & Akkermans, 2003) is a simple technique
to model value creation by firms from a network
perspective. A e-3 value model shows how firms
create value in a network by exchanging objects
having economic value among them. Originally
proposed to gauge the feasibility of new e-commerce
ideas and ventures, e-3 value models have been
successfully applied to many diverse industries, like
healthcare and banks (Kinderen, Gaaloul, & Proper,
2012). Key concepts used in an e-3 value model are
Actor, Value exchange and Value Object.
3 CLASSIFICATION OF
ARCHIMATE ELEMENTS
In this section we classify ArchiMate elements based
on value creation framework presented above and
our definition of value creation as resources,
activities and value.
Value is Business service, Application Service,
Infrastructure Service and Business Product. It is
through these concepts, that the firm exposes its
value offerings to the environment.
Resources are mostly the structural components
in ArchiMate i.e. Business Object, Data Object,
Application Component, Artifact, System Software,
Device, Network, Role, Business Collaboration,
Application Collaboration, Communication Path and
Node.
Activities are behavioral elements in ArchiMate,
i.e., Business Interaction, Application Function,
Business Function, Application Service,
Infrastructure Service, Infrastructure Function,
Application Interaction, Business Process, Business
Service.
The remaining ArchiMate elements do not fall
into any of categories above. Such elements are
Meaning, Contract, Application Interface, etc
.
4 RELATING VALUE TO
RESOURCE AND ACTIVITY
For relating a particular service/product to resources
and activities, which realize it, we have developed
an algorithm which traverses an ArchiMate model as
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