Author: Brenda Yu

An EA stakeholder is an individual or group in an organization with interests in, or concerns relative to, an EA and who is affected by EA products. An EA stakeholder can be internal or external to the enterprise. An EA stakeholder can also be classified based on the organization level—enterprise, domain, project, and operational; and aspect area—business, information, information system, and technical infrastructure.

In addition, each stakeholder carries distinctive needs, interests, and expectations of the EA. There are different motivations for these stakeholders regarding their participation in EA. Indeed, there might be conflicts among the stakeholders’ expected values in the EA’s development, implementation, and maintenance process, etc. One way to manage this conflict is to prioritize expected values fulfillment in the EA based on the stakeholders’ contribution and concern. This involves exploring the role of the stakeholder and their motivations to resolve any potential conflicts and to better prioritize the expected values that the EA plans to deliver. At the top level, one may look to the EA to get holistic enterprise information to understand current enterprise condition, to predict business trend in the future, and to analyze the impact of the upcoming trend on the enterprise. At the next level, one may use the EA to justify the alignment of decisions with a specific business capability. Finally, one may need the EA as a guidance to run day-to-day operations effectively.

Based on these collective insights, an EA stakeholder profile can be constructed. This profile should describe the functional role of the stakeholder in the enterprise; the goals the stakeholder wants to achieve; the tasks or activities needed to fulfill the role; and the level of concern or interest in their particular usage of the EA. These considerations help to form a relative scale of priority in the stakeholder’s expected values of the EA. Following are some of the stakeholder roles as surveyed by Niemi (2007) (not a complete list):

• Application Developer
• Architect
• Business User
• Evaluator
• Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Maintainer
• ICT Operator
• Legislator
• Manager
• Project Manager
• Security Specialist
• Sponsor
• System Developer

References

1. Puspitasari, I., 2016, “Stakeholder’s Expected Value of Enterprise Architecture: An Enterprise Architecture Solution based on Stakeholder Perspective”, 2016 IEEE 14th International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA).
2. Niemi, E., (2007) Enterprise Architecture Stakeholders – a Holistic View, Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Proceedings, 41