Purpose: The purpose of the Business Ecosystem template is to enable an organization to understand itself from an outside-out perspective by modelling the environment in which the organization is embedded.
Core concerns: The Business Ecosystem supplies five elements to model with: Business, People, Things, Business Interaction and Business Moment. The Business Ecosystem template should primarily be used for modeling entities outside the enterprise to identify new business opportunities in the form of Business Moments.
Above you can see a model of a Business Ecosystem. The blue areas are Business Moments, where the interactions between People, Businesses and Things create business opportunities for your enterprise.
Relation to other templates: The Business Ecosystem model is based on the Enterprise Design theories and is as such in the same family as the Customer journey map.
The Business Ecosystem is a strategic model and can be used to document a strategic possibility or track along with for example Business Capability Models, Strategy Models, and Work Models.
Properties and metadata: The Business Ecosystem can for example retain the following information:
- A description of the diagram
- Link to the owner of the application architecture
- Link to the one responsible for the application architecture
- Audits (auto generated information regarding its current state and access rights)
- Associated documents, diagrams and other objects
- Inherent Risk detailing risk considerations
- Governance information detailing information about the published diagram and who has been involved in the approval of the diagram
- Project status: information about budgeted and actual man-hours spent, percentage completed and the latest milestone, result and quality control of a change process.
For more information: If you want to learn more about Enterprise Design, we have a four-part webinar by Milan Guenther available for viewing. You can also visit Milan’s website, where you can learn more about the Enterprise Design framework.