Model-based Systems Architecting

4Identifying Stakeholders: Environment Architecture

4.1. Why identify stakeholders?

Stakeholder identification, or equivalently environment architecture, is a key systemic analysis: each mistake in this analysis may indeed result in flaws in the product under design. We must indeed remember that a system is nothing other than a concrete answer to a series of needs¹ and that these needs are coming from external stakeholders. As an immediate consequence, forgetting important stakeholders, misevaluating their role and/or considering erroneous ones will result in missing needs and/or working with incorrect needs, and hence in missing requirements and/or working with wrong derived requirements, relatively to a given system. The resulting concrete system that might be developed on such a basis will therefore typically either miss the functions and components that are specifically addressing these missing needs, or have unnecessary functions and components that are associated with these incorrect needs. We can therefore easily understand the crucial importance of correctly identifying stakeholders – that is, the necessary and sufficient ones – since any system development process fundamentally relies on the quality of this identification.

To stress on this last point, we shall also have in mind the potential cost(s) of incorrect stakeholder identification which explain why we must put the necessary energy into this core initial analysis. In this matter, we commonly consider that such ...