Towards a Method for Realizing Sustained Competitive Advantage through Business Entity Analysis

Enterprises that succeed in today’s highly dynamic business environment often enjoy Sustained Competitive Advantage (SCA) as defined by Barney. While recent strategy literature focuses on exploring various sources of SCA, in this paper, we present an operational method for realizing SCA through Business Entity analysis. Business entity-centric modeling has been a successful approach in rethinking and revolutionizing business operations, in a number of engagements. Our method provides a path from SCA-generating strategies to Business Operations and Business Entities. The resulting Business Operations can be prototyped and analyzed to validate SCA properties. Our approach leverages key constructs from OMG’s Business Motivation Model (BMM) and emphasizes the analysis of Influencers – factors that have the capability to impact an enterprise’s strategies that generate SCA. Further, these strategies are used to formulate Business Operations that can be defined by Business Entities. IT applications can be generated from the Business Entities using Model-Driven Architecture. Therefore, these discovered Business Entities actually provide a valid scope for innovating Business Operations and developing IT applications that result in SCA for the business.