Productization of Business Models by Affordance Anders W. Tell, Stockholm University, anderswt@dsv.su.se Abstract. Business and enterprise models are information products that people use in work they do with each other. Information products satisfy workers information needs during their deliberations and decision making. This paper continues to build on a work oriented approach to modelling where business models are treated as products created by producers, such as experts or professional modelers, and consumed by workers. In this paper the idea of affordance of products is introduced to enrich discussions about the range of possibilities that products can provide to workers. The addition of affordance, situational knowledge and work practices can improve relevance, effectiveness and other qualities of products. The productization of business and enterprise models enables knowledge and experiences from fields such as new product development, design, and startup to be used in the practices of enterprise and business modeling. The work oriented approach provides a sound basis for evaluations of the use of information products. Keywords. Enterprise modeling, affordance, situational knowledge, product design, design thinking, design science research, practice 1 1 Introduction Business and enterprise models are artifacts used by people in work they do with each other. These models are typically designed and developed by someone with a purpose and a target audience in mind, and a focus on a particular aspect of the enterprise, e.g. processes, business rules, information, vision/goals, and actors [24]. This paper continues to build on the work oriented approach to modeling as introduced at VMBO 2019 [1] by introducing the idea of ‘affordance’. In the work oriented approach business and enterprise models are treated as (information-) products developed to serve (information-) needs. This enables the incorporation of knowledge and experiences from fields such as product development, design and innovation [2]. In particular, when treating enterprise models as products the development process can be seen as going through a journey, from conceptualization and development to evaluation of problem-solution fit and onwards. At each stage there is often a decision to continue, modify the product, do a pivot or discontinue the journey. In the stage of Product-Market Fit questions are asked such as, do the users actually use the product and pay for it? If not, then pivot, modify, or discontinue. A supplied product push out possibilities, features and benefits in use. At the same time customers pull in what they desire and what they consider as useful. This suggests that for a viable situation to occur the product-push and customer-pull must meet, align and fit over time. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 117