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Modeling of Product Software Businesses: Investigation into Industry Product and Channel Typologies

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Abstract

The product software industry lacks a method for describing their products and business models on a high abstraction level. The lack of good methods to model a software product makes it harder to evaluate a business model especially for people with less knowledge of software architectures and more knowledge about the business side of creating software. This chapter presents a model consisting of two diagrams the product context diagram (PCD), which describes the context in which a software product operates and the software supply network (SSN) diagram, which describes the different parties involved in the delivery and deployment of a software product or service. Furthermore, this chapter presents a typology for both diagrams. The proposed diagrams are simple and easy to create therefore providing a quick insight to the core of a business model, creating the diagrams supports the process of evaluating the business model.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the companies that participated in this research. Without their help this research would not have been possible. We also thank the students of the Informatics Business course at the Utrecht University. The students provided us with cases and valuable feedback. Furthermore, we thank the students of the Junior College Utrecht for their research into the gaming industry in the Netherlands.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information and Computer Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

    Sjaak Brinkkemper, Ivo van Soest & Slinger Jansen

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  1. Sjaak Brinkkemper
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  2. Ivo van Soest
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  3. Slinger Jansen
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Correspondence to Sjaak Brinkkemper .

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    © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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    Brinkkemper, S., Soest, I., Jansen, S. (2009). Modeling of Product Software Businesses: Investigation into Industry Product and Channel Typologies. In: Wojtkowski, W., Wojtkowski, G., Lang, M., Conboy, K., Barry, C. (eds) Information Systems Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68772-8_24

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68772-8_24

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