Key Business Artifacts: a Methodology for the Strategic Model within the Mdbt (Model Driven Business Transformation) Framework

The present research in progress paper presents the description and formalization of a new strategic analysis methodology that allows a vision of the whole business of a company as a set of interacting Business Artifacts that operate upon firm resources.The concept of Business Artifact (BA) already introduced and used for business process modeling within the Model Driven Business Transformation (MDBT) framework is the basic element of our methodology. The theoretical foundations of the work are provided by the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm theory (Barney, 1991). Considering that, by definition, each Business Artifact has a data model, in which all the resources it needs and uses during its lifecycle are specified, we want to identify which Business Artifacts are strategically relevant for a company and prioritize them according to the Sustained Competitive Advantage they could be able to provide. These key BAs should then be the target of any IT-dependent strategic initiative, that should include actions aimed at improving or transforming these BAs in order to achieve, mantain and exploit the company competitive advantage.

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