Title: Unified Business Modeling for FI ecosystems Session: The Methodology Session Abstract Project context Design, deployment

and operations of future networks are expected to tackle a diverse range of business and technical challenges allowing for the emergence of disruptive business models and new industrial ecosystems. Autonomic networks will help operators to shift from their traditional static pipe-centric approach (and related OAM/OSS/BSS architecture) to a service-enabler and/or service-centric approach allowing the emergence of diverse disruptive business models, applications and new industrial structures. The UniverSelf project is designing a Unified Management Framework (UMF) to enable autonomic principles in existing and emerging networking architectures. Introducing autonomic networking may have several business impacts: changes in control of operators assets, decentralisation of the architecture, simplification of operation and maintenance tasks and efficient monitoring of the architecture. These factors will contribute to improved QoS, optimised service provision price/quality ratio and the emergence and support of new business relationships. In order to extensively evaluate these business changes in an ecosystem focused on delivering autonomic networking, a number of innovative business scenarios have been defined. Business research methodology Univerself proposes an elaborated version of the Unified Business Model (UBM) reflecting an overarching business ecosystem and a common reference model covering several technical and business challenges of autonomics and intending to create the basis for evaluating the feasibility of the future networks business ecosystem as a whole. This reference framework includes: The use cases and the corresponding business scenarios highlighting main technical aspects and implications of future autonomics networks, The involved business roles, the proposed value and indicative revenue flows for the identified and described technical areas around unified future network management, Business Roles classification (according to UBM approach) and positioning within the broader ecosystem.

Having identified the different roles, the next step consists of identifying the main MACTOR actors (equivalent to Composite Roles or an aggregation of Discrete and Embedded Roles as defined in the UBM) and business and strategic objectives. The MACTOR method is wellsuited to evaluate inter-stakeholder relationships and attempts to give an overview of alliances and antagonisms between the actors towards the business objectives in a business model and thereby allows evaluating deployment models. In its turn, the Business Model Configuration Matrix provides a framework to phrase those strategic objectives in terms of crucial control and value parameters and consider actors positions on these objectives reflecting their evaluation of the control and value design choices. The parameters of the Business Model Configuration Matrix encapsulate the dimensions of value creation on the

one hand (which relates to aspects such as the value proposition and the financial model), and the dimension of control on the other hand (relating to the outset of the value network and the functional architecture). Thus, the MACTOR method and Business Model Configuration Matrix are applied here to simulate actors positions and impacts on business models. Having reached this point, there is a fair understanding of the strategic objectives, the actors and inter-relationships involved the business ecosystem. As the Univerself project covers a limited set of use cases and the methodology can easily be ported to other FI domains (an exercise which was originally performed in the WWI domain upon conception of the UBM), it could serve as an overarching analytical tool for socio-economic FI research, by presenting a unified business ontology and a harmonized approach to identifying business opportunities and bottlenecks, with a clear strategic and value network oriented focus.