Designing consumer-aligned services using business value modelling

Given the dominance of service industries in today's economy, service improvement and innovation have become major concerns of many enterprises. To address these challenges, the service design should start at the business level at which services can be identified to provide values in an economically viable way by satisfying consumers' preferences for quality aspects. However, high-level business concepts, like value offerings, are hardly linked to technology levels, such as SOA and web services. Relying on the model driven development (MDD) and ontology paradigms, the paper proposes a method that uses business value models to elicit and structure business services from a consumer-centric quality perspective and transforming the business service model further to a web service model. To facilitate major MDD aspects, such as semantic-level descriptions and automated transformations, these models are designed as ontologies. A case study from the Swedish eye-care health sector is used to ground the presented method.