A method to support a reflective derivation of business components from conceptual models

To successfully compete in today’s volatile business environments, enterprises need to consolidate, flexibly adapt, and extend their information systems (IS) with new functionality. Component-based development approaches can help solving these challenges as they support the structuring of IS landscapes into business components with a loosely coupled business functionality. However, the structuring process continues to pose research challenges and is not adequately supported yet. Current approaches to support the structuring process typically rely on procedures that cannot be customized to the designer’s situational preferences. Furthermore, they do not allow the designer to identify and reflect emerging conflicts during the structuring. In this paper, we therefore propose a new method that introduces a rational, reflective procedure to systematically derive an optimized structuring according to situational preferences. Using a design science approach, we show (i) how the derivation of business components can be formulated as a customizable multi-criteria decision making problem and (ii) how conceptual models can be used to derive business components with an optimized functional scope. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method, we describe its application in a complex case that was taken from a German DAX-30 automobile manufacturer.