Respondent: Chen Hsi Tsai, DSV
Opponent: PhD Irina Rychkov, Université Paris – Panthéon – Sorbonne, France
Examiner: Professor Uno Fors, DSV
Main supervisor: Professor Janis Stirna, DSV
Supervisor: Professor Jelena Zdravkovic, DSV
Chair: Associate Professor Erik Perjons, DSV

Abstract
Organisations and companies are transforming their ways of conducting business by combining digitalisation and digital collaboration in digital business ecosystems (DBE) in order to be able to remain competitive in global markets. However, for companies and organisations to be able to take full advantage of such collaborative business constellations, several challenges, including the capture and coordination of information concerning individual DBE actors and various perspectives of a DBE and the design of resilience for a DBE, need to be addressed.

Enterprise Modelling has proved to be useful in capturing and documenting organisational designs and hence it can offer support in tackling these challenges in terms of capturing and depicting abstract representations of DBEs. Several modelling approaches have already been proposed for this purpose, yet they address the challenge only partially. For example, they do not address explicitly the specific contexts in which DBEs operate, the various perspectives of their design, or the resilience of DBEs. This thesis follows Design Science research with the aim of establishing a modelling method for the design, analysis, and management of resilient digital business ecosystems. The modelling method as a design artefact provides methodological support in capturing, understanding, and documenting DBEs’ various perspectives and resilience. A systematic literature review was conducted for the initial problem explication to explore the modelling approaches presented in DBE-related studies. A survey on DBE roles and prototyping sessions of modelling the resilience in a healthcare DBE case contributed also to the problem explication.

The findings suggested an immature state of the art of DBE modelling and the need for a holistic modelling method integrating the various perspectives, resilience, and DBE roles. The suggested list of DBE roles based on the survey and the requirements derived from experts’ opinions served as the input (requirements) for the design and development of the artefact. Using Situational Method Engineering, we proposed the process of the DBE modelling method in module maps. The module maps and the resilient modelling components as parts of the design artefact contributed as the basis for the development of the complete DBE modelling method. Future work will focus on the iterative cycles for the remaining two artefact components, the meta-model and the mapping of existing methods with the proposed DBE modelling method, and the evaluation of the complete design artefact concerning the entire doctoral research project.

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