the capabilities of BMOs to support the design and
evaluation of viable business models remains unclear,
particularly in complex business settings.
Therefore, this paper presents a list of fundamen-
tal criteria to which a BMO should comply in or-
der to facilitate the design of viable business models
and, therefore, enterprise architectures. These criteria
are subsequently used to assess six well-established
modelling ontologies. Out of the six ontologies,
four were specifically conceived to represent business
models (e3-value, VNA, BMC, and EBMS), while the
other two (VSM & REA) were conceived for differ-
ent purposes. However, they could possibly be used
as BMOs (for more details we refer to Section 4.2).
Therefore, we refer to these modelling ontologies as
BMOs.
This was done, in order to select the most appro-
priate BMO, and to identify the deficits and areas for
improvement from a viability perspective. This will
allow future research to enhance BMOs to fully sup-
port viability as an explicit design focus of business
models.
Accordingly, the paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 provides a discussion on related work. Sec-
tion 3 describes the criteria as provided in literature.
Subsequently, Section 4 applies the criteria to assess
current BMOs. Finally, the paper is concluded in Sec-
tion 5, along with some directions for future research.
2 RELATED WORK
The boundaries of traditional enterprises are shifting
from a single organisation to a network of organisa-
tions (Lankshorst, 2009). This has led to the enter-
prise architectures being developed, owned, and op-
erated in a highly distributed manner, which in turn
has lead to misaligned and inflexible enterprise ar-
chitectures (Kraussl-Derzsi, 2011; Ross et al., 2006).
Furthermore, for an enterprise architecture to be ef-
fective, it has to enable the business strategy. How-
ever, the distance between strategy and enterprise ar-
chitecture is very large, because it is hard to conceive
and design enterprise architectures based on general
strategy statements (Ross et al., 2006; Engelsman and
Wieringa, 2012). Therefore, scholars have argued that
the concept of business models helps to address the
above challenges by conceptualising and translating
the strategy into a blueprint that describes how busi-
ness is carried out (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2002;
Pateli and Giaglis, 2004; Ross et al., 2006; Al-Debei
and Avison, 2010). The business model, as shown in
Figure 1, is the linking pin between strategy and the
enterprise architecture (Al-Debei and Avison, 2010;
Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2002; Pateli and Giaglis,
2004). As such, it is critical that the enterprise ar-
chitectures are derived from a viable business model.
Strategy Business model
Guides
Enterprise
architecture
Enables
Guides
Enables
Figure 1: Business model in relation to strategy and enter-
prise architecture.
An important distinction between a business
model and strategy is that business models are con-
cerned with translating strategy into a business ar-
chitecture, while strategy also includes competition.
A business architecture describes how the different
components of a business model fit together (Oster-
walder and Pigneur, 2005; Pateli and Giaglis, 2004;
Al-Debei and Avison, 2010; Teece, 2010). Therefore,
we exclude the conceptualisation of strategy.
The business model concept is relatively young
and scholars are constantly debating the meaning and
scope of the concept (Pateli and Giaglis, 2004; Lam-
bert, 2003). Furthermore, scholars from different dis-
ciplines are studying the concept of business models,
which makes it difficult to agree on a common defi-
nition. There has been considerable interest in inte-
grating the multidisciplinary views and arriving at a
common definition (Pateli and Giaglis, 2004; Lam-
bert, 2003; Roelens and Poels, 2013).
Scholars are also interested in the design of vi-
able business models. They focus on identifying the
factors, characteristics, and conditions that lead to
viable business models. Furthermore, they provide
guidelines and evaluation criteria for business mod-
els (Sharma and Guti´errez, 2010; De Reuver and
Haaker, 2009; Keen and Qureshi, 2006). The vi-
ability of business models is mainly studied from
two perspectives. Some use a qualitative approach
to conceptualise and analyse viable business models
(Sharma and Guti´errez, 2010; De Reuver and Haaker,
2009), whereas others use BMOs to conceptualise,
design, analyse, and evaluate viable business mod-
els (Kraussl-Derzsi, 2011; Gordijn and Akkermans,
2003). BMOs are a reliable way of conceptualising,
designing and evaluating business models (Pateli and
Giaglis, 2004).
BMOs and business models are related, but not the
same. A BMO is a language, which can be used to
conceptualise and communicate any number of busi-
ness models. For example, e3-value can be used to
conceptualise and communicate business models of
companies (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2005). There
has been some interest in the past to compare BMOs
for different purposes. In (Gordijn et al., 2005), a
frameworkis proposed to compare BMOs to find sim-
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