| Lesson 4 | Perspectives |
| Objective | Describe the objectives of e-business stakeholders. |
Objectives of e-business Stakeholders
The architect can best sell the e-business design to the organization by fully understanding and, perhaps more importantly, by anticipating the concerns of individual stakeholders, groups of stakeholders, and the organization as a whole.
Understanding Objectives of e-business stakeholders
In identifying the likely concerns of stakeholders, it is best to start with the underlying company structure.
| Stakeholders |
Greatest concern |
Questions to anticipate |
| The Management Board |
To ensure the ongoing and increasing profitability and viability of the enterprise |
What will the enterprise gain from the implementation? Can the implementation be achieved without negative impact on the business? |
| Operations and Customer Service |
To maintain or improve service levels at the lowest possible cost |
Will volumes increase or decrease in any part of the operation? How will customer service need to change to accommodate the solution? |
| Sales and Marketing |
To achieve a greater penetration of the targeted customer base and how to increase sales. |
How will this solution affect my customers? Will the image of the business be enhanced or damaged? How will branding be affected? |
| Finance |
To reduce unit costs |
What are the implementation and running costs of the e-business solution? What other costs will be affected and how? |
| Systems |
To provide and maintain reliable and adequate systems for all aspects of the enterprise |
Is the proposed solution viable from a systems' perspective? Do we have the necessary skills available to develop and run the solution? |
| Legal |
To ensure the enterprise operates within the law and does not expose itself to unnecessary risks |
What are the legal and regulatory requirements of operating in the virtual world? What new risks are introduced by the e-business solution? |
Legal considerations carry tremendous significance for any enterprise. It is critical to include the legal department in all e-business discussions.
Change Management
Stakeholder buy-in is critical to the success of an e-business. Although the task of convincing stakeholders can be formidable, the benefits of
ensuring their buy-in can significantly affect the success of the project.
To successfully manage the change to e-business, the architect should:
- Involve a wide variety of representative stakeholders to map implementation issues to performance
- Conduct a broad-based internal survey of stakeholders that rates the importance of each issue
- Analyze the survey to identify consensus and disconnects in importance among subgroups of stakeholders
- Tie the importance ratings to specific phases of the implementation to identify where change interventions might be introduced for best impact
In the next lesson, we will outline the key issues and concerns that an architect must consider in order to address the concerns of the stakeholders.