Capabilities provide a structured and stable business-centric view of what an organization does. By enabling the organization’s architecture of what it is able to do, as modular functional building blocks, capability has become a standard design element of enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, OMG Business Architecture, and many others. Despite clear modularity and purpose of the capability notion, for many companies becoming capability-aware and being able to continuously and efficiently manage a large portfolio of capabilities is a very tedious task. To address this challenge, this study sets a foundation to leverage capability management by the means of a capability middleware broker and LLM support. The envisioned theoretical solution is exemplified by a real business case from the HE domain.

In contrast to traditional business models, Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) have several distinctive features - heterogeneity of involved actors, symbiosis in the exchange of resources, co-evolution of their interactions, and self-organisation. Designing DBEs is a task demanding a well-defined DBE’s scope, roles and responsibilities of the actors, their interactions and dependencies, as well as versatile technologies and data. The study focuses on two DBEs – Marispace-X and Skippo in the maritime domain to capture the tenets of the blue economy with dataspaces. Because the design approaches to DBE are scarce due to the paradigm’s novelty, the study aims to evaluate a model-based design method, DBEmap. The evaluation results concerning practitioners’ perceived usefulness of the DBEmap and its support for integrating DBE-related perspectives and designing and managing DBE resilience are presented.

The digital business ecosystem (DBE) is a paradigm that enables organisations and companies to develop and monitor innovative business models within collaborative business constellations. By combining digitalisation with digital collaboration, DBEs offer advantages such as cross-domain and trans-geographical collaboration, co-evolution driven by diverse interests, and adaptation through self-organising characteristics. However, to enable companies and organisations to fully benefit from DBEs, several challenges must be addressed, which include capturing, understanding, and coordinating information about individual DBE actors and their interdependencies, as well as establishing an overarching view that incorporates various perspectives on a DBE. In addition, the resilience of a DBE, in terms of its long-term viability, needs to be designed and monitored to ensure the continuity and stability of the ecosystem. Enterprise modelling has proven effective in capturing and documenting organisational designs, and can play a crucial role in overcoming these challenges by capturing and depicting abstract representations of DBEs.

The work presented in this thesis follows design science research, with the aim of establishing a modelling method for the design, analysis, and management of DBEs and their resilience. The design artefact developed here is a modelling method named DBEmap, which provides methodological support for capturing, understanding, and documenting the various perspectives on and resilience of DBEs. As a design artefact, the DBEmap modelling method targets the key actors (or “drivers”) within DBEs as users. DBEmap consists of 11 method modules that reflect critical perspectives on a DBE, along with a meta-model, a graphical language notation, and guidelines.

A systematic literature review was conducted to explicate the initial problem and explore the modelling approaches that had been previously presented in DBE-related studies. Prototyping sessions were carried out with a focus on modelling DBE resilience, alongside a survey on DBE roles using a healthcare DBE case, which also contributed to the explication of the problem. The findings highlighted the immaturity of the current state of DBE modelling and the need for a holistic modelling method.

The DBEmap modelling method was designed and developed based on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with experts and a survey analysis of DBE roles and responsibilities. These data helped to elicit the requirements for DBEmap. The design and development process involved three sub-activities: (1) developing the method modules and application guidelines using situational method engineering, (2) constructing the meta-model, and (3) creating the graphical modelling language notation.

To demonstrate and evaluate DBEmap, stakeholders from four real-world DBEs in the healthcare, higher education, and maritime domains were engaged, as well as case-independent experts from the finance and public sectors. The evaluation process followed an iterative approach using action research, semi-structured interviews, workshops, and a web-based questionnaire. The web-based questionnaire assessed experts' perceived usefulness of DBEmap in meeting the identified requirements. It included 27 statements, rated on a five-point Likert scale. The results showed similar patterns across evaluation cycles, and ex ante artificial settings were compared with ex post naturalistic ones. Qualitative feedback from semi-structured interviews indicated positive perceptions, particularly regarding the understanding of DBE concepts and constructs, visualising complexity and interconnections, and identifying gaps and balancing perspectives.

In summary, DBEmap can effectively address challenges related to integrating DBE perspectives and managing DBE resilience. This thesis also contributes to design knowledge in the field of method engineering and lays the groundwork for future research. Potential areas for further work include the integration of other Information Systems methods, extended evaluations with industrial partners over a longer timeframe, and improvements to the DBEmap tool.

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) theory has evolved to facilitate the functioning of open business networks by adopting the ecosystem paradigm from nature in a shared digital environment. While it enables exhibiting diverse interests, it also places high demands on managing the DBE’s resilience. The current research lacks support for how a DBE-based business model can be integrated with its supporting information system’s data structure to enable the design and monitoring of resilience for indicating the needed adaptations caused by changes in DBE’s actors, their engagement or performance balance. We propose and instantiate a meta-model that describes the DBE’s entities relevant to its design using the CIVIS ecosystem. The meta-model provides a foundation for a modelling language for the management of the resilience of DBE.

Organisations and companies are transforming their ways of conducting business by combining digitalisation and digital collaboration in digital business ecosystems (DBE) in order to be able to remain competitive in global markets. However, for companies and organisations to be able to take full advantage of such collaborative business constellations, several challenges, including the capture and coordination of information concerning individual DBE actors and various perspectives of a DBE and the design of resilience for a DBE, need to be addressed. Enterprise Modelling has proved to be useful in capturing and documenting organisational designs and hence it can offer support in tackling these challenges in terms of capturing and depicting abstract representations of DBEs. Several modelling approaches have already been proposed for this purpose, yet they address the challenge only partially. For example, they do not address explicitly the specific contexts in which DBEs operate, the various perspectives of their design, or the resilience of DBEs.

This thesis follows Design Science research with the aim of establishing a modelling method for the design, analysis, and management of resilient digital business ecosystems. The modelling method as a design artefact provides methodological support in capturing, understanding, and documenting DBEs’ various perspectives and resilience.

A systematic literature review was conducted for the initial problem explication to explore the modelling approaches presented in DBE-related studies. A survey on DBE roles and prototyping sessions of modelling the resilience in a healthcare DBE case contributed also to the problem explication. The findings suggested an immature state of the art of DBE modelling and the need for a holistic modelling method integrating the various perspectives, resilience, and DBE roles.

The suggested list of DBE roles based on the survey and the requirements derived from experts’ opinions served as the input (requirements) for the design and development of the artefact. Using Situational Method Engineering, we proposed the process of the DBE modelling method in module maps. The module maps and the resilient modelling components as parts of the design artefact contributed as the basis for the development of the complete DBE modelling method.

Future work will focus on the iterative cycles for the remaining two artefact components, the meta-model and the mapping of existing methods with the proposed DBE modelling method, and the evaluation of the complete design artefact concerning the entire doctoral research project.

Digital business ecosystem (DBE) is a paradigm that enables developing and monitoring novel business models of collaborating organisations and individuals using ICT as the foundation. Different from traditional online networked models such as manufacturer, retailer, or franchise centred, using a shared digital environment, DBE fosters heterogeneity, symbiosis, coevolution, and self-organisation of its multiple actors, which enables it to span different business domains as well as exhibits diverse interests. For many organisations and individuals, DBE presents a new collaborative approach to leverage offered and desired resources among the involved members to meet each of their goals. As such, it is foreseen to be of high value to the involved actors, but at the same time, it is often complex due to many correlated interactions of these actors and thus difficult to design and manage. Furthermore, the current state of the art shows a lack of methodological guidance for DBE design. We propose a method for DBE design that follows the requirements collected from industry experts and practitioners by applying situational method engineering to enable its modularised design. The method for design is validated by action research in the setting of Digital Vaccine, a Swedish DBE managing health-related services.

In traditional business models, organisations typically work independently and have limited interactions with other entities in the network. In contrast, Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) foster collaboration, responsibility-taking, and resource sharing between multiple actors, enabling them to leverage their capabilities. Such characteristics require in return well-thought approaches for identification and design of the DBE components and tasks unified in an underlying digital environment. In this study, we address this challenge by proposing a modular model-based method for design of DBE that uses Situational Method Engineering as the underlying methodology and meta-models that describe the concepts and relationships on the modular level. We have illustrated some applications of the method and design task with existing enterprise architecture and enterprise modelling approaches.

Information Systems (IS) of modern organizations and enterprises often rely on a network of partners’ IS to deliver the services. The resilience of this network is the necessary condition for the operation of such ISs. The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) theory has emerged as an approach to ensure functioning and resilience in dynamic and open networks. This paper presents three cases of analysis of resilience of DBEs. The objective of the analysis is to assess the resilience of DBEs during its design phase. During this phase, often, only structural information presented in ISs models is available. In order to assess the resilience, the DBE models are analyzed for the potential for fulfilment of typical ecosystem goals and roles. The three DBE cases analyzed are winter road maintenance, digital vaccine, and Covid-19 testing. The paper evaluates the resilience of the DBEs and formulates the practices for uncovering and strengthening it.

The changing business landscapes urge organizations to collaborate and combine their expertise to stay competitive. Organizations establish partnerships and collaborate via the Internet, which often happens dynamically and at fast pace resulting in formation of Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs). DBEs are complex and their management requires having explicit and up-to-date information about them. Modeling enables thorough visual analysis and facilitates the understanding and formation of DBEs. It also allows viewing DBEs through multiple perspectives, as well as exploring alternatives in the course of DBE formation or management. This systematic review aims to synthesize existing studies pertaining to Conceptual Modeling for analysis, design, and management of DBEs. A total of 94 studies were included in the review. The findings suggest that there is a scarcity of existing Conceptual Modeling methods and tools supporting DBEs. Additionally, the extensive emphasis on DBEs’ actors in modeling leads to an urgent need for the methods to be extended to support the establishment of holistic views for integrating multiple perspectives of DBEs. Future research should focus on these areas to facilitate the transformation of how organization’s collaborations are viewed – from a single-organization to a multitude of viewpoints on organizational networks of collaboration, coexistence, and competition. Such models also need to support the key features of DBEs, such as resilience and automation.

Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) supports organizations to combine their expertise in a novel collaborative network through information and communications technology. Despite its beneficial aspects, a DBE is intricate and difficult to manage due to the dependent interactions and interrelationships among actors. Modelling, as a proven way to deal with complex problems in organisational settings, can support the capturing and documenting of a DBE. This can enhance the level of abstraction of the DBE to aid the analysis and decision-making. However, current scientific literature shows a lack of methodological guidance for modelling in support of the analysis, design, and management of DBEs. Hence, in this study, we have proposed a foundation for a DBE design, analysis, and management method based on Situational Method Engineering (SME). Using the requirements empirically collected from a number of industrial practitioners and experts, the main concepts and intentions relevant to DBE design, analysis and management were defined. Based on them, using the SME approach, we modelled and presented several method process parts that layout fulfilment of the intentions for the concepts’ development using different, situation-related, strategies (i.e. method chunks).