The Development and Experimental Evaluation of a Focused Business Model Representation

Business models (BM) are the central concept to understand the business logic of an organization. Enterprise modeling contributes to the conceptualization of BMs by providing explicit representations. A proper BM representation helps to increase the understanding and communication about the underlying knowledge for the stakeholders within a company. However, the existing enterprise modeling languages have a different and partial focus on the BM concept due to their various backgrounds. This prevents the large-scale adoption of these representations in practice. Therefore a focused BM viewpoint is developed, which explicitly facilitates the understanding about the underlying BM components. To this end, existing diagrams of the value delivery modeling language were adapted to prescriptions of the physics of notations, which is a normative theory for cognitive effectiveness of diagrammatic representations. The effect on the understanding was evaluated by an experiment with 93 master students. The results confirm the research hypothesis that the new BM viewpoint increases the understanding of the modeled BM components.