Modeling Digital Business Ecosystems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The changing business landscapes urge organizations to collaborate and combine their expertise to stay competitive. Organizations establish partnerships and collaborate via the Internet, which often happens dynamically and at fast pace resulting in formation of Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs). DBEs are complex and their management requires having explicit and up-to-date information about them. Modeling enables thorough visual analysis and facilitates the understanding and formation of DBEs. It also allows viewing DBEs through multiple perspectives, as well as exploring alternatives in the course of DBE formation or management. This systematic review aims to synthesize existing studies pertaining to Conceptual Modeling for analysis, design, and management of DBEs. A total of 94 studies were included in the review. The findings suggest that there is a scarcity of existing Conceptual Modeling methods and tools supporting DBEs. Additionally, the extensive emphasis on DBEs’ actors in modeling leads to an urgent need for the methods to be extended to support the establishment of holistic views for integrating multiple perspectives of DBEs. Future research should focus on these areas to facilitate the transformation of how organization’s collaborations are viewed – from a single-organization to a multitude of viewpoints on organizational networks of collaboration, coexistence, and competition. Such models also need to support the key features of DBEs, such as resilience and automation.