Issue #13 [May 15-May 19]
Enterprise Stakeholders
Stakeholder role identification and analysis is an inevitable part of enterprise architecture development. In last week’s discussion, we briefly covered the importance of enterprise entity and its various types. Enterprise stakeholder analysis and identification should be the next step towards building the foundation for enterprise architecture. Identifying stakeholder taxonomy within enterprise entity development allows for effective requirement traceability and change management. “Stakeholder surrogacy has powerful and paradoxical connotations in requirements engineering. It is almost a dogma that projects should seek out ever-closer dialogue with stakeholders – consider the current fashion for Integrated Project Teams, facilitated workshops, rapid prototyping, agile development with user stories, etc. Yet all the time, the obvious truth is glossed over: that it is remarkably rare to be able to talk to many stakeholders in the flesh.” (Alexander). Stakeholder analysis is one of the most common treatments in any project. On the other hand, it is also a puzzle that suffers from wrong diagnosis and treatment. Enterprise Stakeholders may be human beings, an entity or a computational system. This week, we will introduce enterprise stakeholders and discuss their importance within enterprise architecture.
Stakeholders: Who are they?
Stakeholders are individuals, teams, or organizations who play key roles in, and have different concerns about, the system. Take for example end users, developers, business managers, acquirers and so on. The stakeholder is an individual or group interested in the success of the organization. Identifying appropriate stakeholders is one of the first criteria to be fulfilled to build successful enterprise architectures.
Enterprise Stakeholders may have various concerns which are most often covered by enterprise viewpoints. Each of these viewpoints is then realized into the enterprise view. The following diagram briefly depicts this scenario (adapted as per enterprise architecture requirements from IEEE 1471-2000 architecture standard):
Enterprise stakeholders, therefore, are the natural drivers of any enterprise system. GERAM does not facilitate the enterprise stakeholder identification step directly but does so through human oriented concepts. GERAM recognizes the enterprise stakeholder’s contribution within the EML step. TOGAF identifies the following stakeholders: users, systems and software engineers, operators, administrators and managers, and acquirers. The guidelines for enterprise stakeholder analysis should be an important part of any enterprise architecture design.
Stakeholder taxonomy and the onion model
There are different schools of thoughts in the industry to analyze and identify the enterprise stakeholder. However, the onion ring model proposed by Ian F Alexander in his book “A Taxonomy of Stakeholders” is an extremely valuable tool in understanding the nature of stakeholders and their impact on any entity system. There are primarily 4 default circles available, as shown below:
The following table briefly explains the 4 layered onion model:
It is recommended that as many layers as are required be added to implement any enterprise system and express that system through the onion ring model. This model is particularly useful to understand the ripple effect of stakeholder layers within a particular system.
A few examples of enterprise stakeholders are customers, suppliers, external regulators, government regulators, business process experts, domain experts, managers, etc.
Enterprise stakeholder analysis
Enterprise Stakeholder identification is one of the foremost activities within any enterprise architecture development phase. The following steps will help us understand and analyze enterprise stakeholders:
- Identify the “who” within any particular entity system in the perspective of “what” they do or their economic value return.
- Identify the enterprise stakeholder surrogate if necessary.
- Understand the stakeholders’ perception from the entity perspective and its potential effects on other stakeholders utilizing the onion model.
- Analyze the enterprise stakeholders’ contribution towards each step of the enterprise master plan (this will be discussed in the forthcoming weeks).
- Analyze the risk model for each of the stakeholders’ viewpoints.
- Finalize the decision making model utilizing the tradeoff treatment of enterprise stakeholders’ impact personalities.
Conclusion
This week, we have briefly discussed enterprise stakeholder identification techniques and the onion model. Enterprise Stakeholder analysis through the stakeholders’ impact personalities will help us understand the steps of enterprise architecture development based on the enterprise entity. Enterprise stakeholder analysis enables the enterprise perspective cube (this will be discussed in forthcoming weeks) improvement cycle. Stages in the enterprise improvement cycle like “was”, “as-is”, “should-be”, “needs-are”, “could-be” and “to be” are easily analyzed and explained with the help of enterprise stakeholder concepts.
References
- Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases through the system development life-cycle by Iain Alexander, and Neil Maiden (Editors), John Wiley.
- Writing Better Requirements by Ian F. Alexander and Richards Stevens, Addison-Wesley.
- [Alexander] A Taxonomy of Stakeholders by Ian F. Alexander (http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~iany/consultancy/stakeholder_taxonomy/stakeholder_taxonomy.htm)
- [IEEE] IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software- Intensive systems. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Std 1471-2000
- Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, Berlin : Springer (2003) by in P.Bernus, L.Nemes and G. Schmidt (Eds)
- Managing The Extended Enterprise: The new stakeholder view by James E Post, Lee E Preston and Sybille Sachs>/li>
- A Survey of Software Architecture Viewpoint Models by Nicholas May
- Cracks in the Foundation of Stakeholder Theory by Andrew R. Weiss (http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/Vol1_1/weiss.pdf)
- [TOGAF] TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) Version 8.1 "Enterprise Edition". Available from http://www.opengroup.org
