Master Thesis Oliver Schmidt

Identification and Evaluation of Use Cases for inter-organizational Business Capability Modeling

Organizations face several challenges due to the changing business environment, including continuously changing customer needs or technical innovations. In order to cope with these various challenges, organizations are increasingly engaging in collaborations with their suppliers, customers, and even their competitors. Diverse aims are persuaded by such an approach, ranging from synergy effects to knowledge exchange. The complexity of such collaborations requires an adequate Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), but even then, it is a challenging task. Business capability modeling is an approach to address this issue. It structures and illustrates the complexity in a different way to provide new and additional insights. Business capabilities provide an abstracted and holistic view of an organization, which can be used to align the business and IT. This view is captured in a Business Capability Map (BCM). Although the use of the BCM was initially for single organizations, it is increasingly used for the inter-organizational collaboration context. One of such a collaboration context is the horizontal inter-organizational collaboration. The collaboration participants are typical competitors from the same industry, having the same or similar business capabilities, which allows creating a common business capability map for collaboration endeavors. However, research in this domain is still limited while gaining increasing importance in practice. There is a demand for empirical results of the actual usage of such a common business capability map, which is represented by possible use cases.
Hence, it is necessary to continue the research to obtain comprehensive insights and create a profound and holistic understanding that is of great interest to researchers and practitioners alike.
Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to this research field by employing a multiple case study of the use of business capability maps in horizontal inter-organizational collaborations with five collaborations from various industries. The overall structure is divided into three parts: First, the identification of use cases for BCM through a literature review, which represents the state of the art and the starting point for identifying use cases for horizontal inter-organizational collaborations. Second, typical collaboration challenges are identified in the literature and evaluated for the horizontal collaboration context as well as if the BCM can address the challenges. Finally, the challenges and success factors for a BCM usage in the collaboration context are determined. This thesis resulted in a concept of 23 use cases for three different inter-organizational collaboration contexts.