How to apply Business Model Canvas in ARIS (Part 2)

In my previous post, I explained the basics of Business Model Canvas. Today, I will tell you how to design your own business model using ARIS Business Strategy.

Step one – Create a basic structure

Strategists and consultants of course have to understand the business model of a company, existing limitations and how it all fits together. Ask the following questions during your workshops: What is our business model like? What are its basic elements?

In this early phase of designing a business model, you can use tools like SWOT analysis to think about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business model or – of course – you directly apply the Canvas with its nine building blocks to provide a basic structure.

Here is a picture I found in the Internet showing the creative work behind the design of a business model. This is the first step towards bringing structure to your business model - a real canvas covering the wall of your room.

Figure 1. Workshop result on a wall 

(Source: http://fa.ltings.de/business-model-canvas-geschaftsmodelle-visualisieren/)

Step two – Provide the business model to stakeholders

A good idea doesn’t create value unless it's implemented. That’s why owners of a Business Model Canvas have to provide the model to their stakeholders (e.g. managers, employees, investors) so that stakeholders get a baseline, future discussions can build on. So it makes sense to not only provide the results of a business model workshop in the form of presentation slides or pictures in a JPG file format.

Here it comes to tools like ARIS Business Strategy which support the easy distribution of a Business Model Canvas to one or more stakeholders with a repository-based modeling approach and distinct user access rights. Additionally, you probably want to work with the business model and improve it step by step towards a desired to-be state. Tools like ARIS which provide collaboration capabilities make it easy to track changes in the model and allow a distributed design and management of your Business Model Canvas.

Figure 2. Transfer the Canvas from your workshop to your ARIS Repository

Step three – Map the canvas

Now, we come to one of the most challenging tasks of designing a business model: The mapping to the business and enterprise architecture.

As there is no standard for the mapping available in the market, every company faces the challenge of mapping by its own. So, I guess that everyone of you would find good ways to map your business model to your business processes. Working with Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, I would suggest to map the Canvas and its components the following way:

Outlook

As you see, plenty of mappings can be implemented and I guess that many more mappings might be useful to connect the Business Model Canvas to the business and enterprise architecture. If you have additional ideas, please share them with us!

The mapping is a crucial step to analyze the dependencies between a business model and other elements as e.g. business processes. As you plan to change the business model of your company, a change in your processes is quite obvious. This has to be planned and implemented on a reliable database with a structured approach.

Other interesting questions are: How are business strategies and business models related to each other? How to set up a business strategy and how to use modeling capabilities to support this task?

So what do you think? What are the challenges you are facing in the context of the design and implementation of your business models and business strategies?