Ken & Team,
Man, my head is starting to hurt again! Not to mention my eyes trying to
sift through all this e-mail clutter. I guess I don't understand what the
confusion is here.
Ken, are you perhaps mixing the notion of "stakeholders" with
"participants." If not, then what the heck are stakeholders anyway? In the
most general context, stakeholders are individuals, teams, or organizations
(or classes thereof) that have key roles in, have an interest in, or are
concerned about "something." Frank has extended that definition in the RA
to include the possibility of non-human stakeholders and that stakeholders
have "an interest in the outcomes of service interactions, even though the
do not necessarily participate in service interactions." Frank's definition
assumes, of course, that where talking about stakeholders in the context of
a SOA so one could also refer to these as service stakeholders. All the
other possible stakeholders in the world that have a role to play, an
interest in, or a concern about some other problem domain are not really
what we care about. Sidebar: While I personally do not like the notion of
including non-human entities as possible stakeholders, I do agree in the
existence of non-human service participants.
In the RA, participants, specifically, "service participants" are examples
of stakeholders whose interests lie in the successful use of and fulfillment
of services. Because service participants are a special class of
stakeholders that actually "act" in the context of a SOA, they have do
something that involves the use and fulfillment of services. [Emphasis on
"services".] As you know, thus far in the RA we have only documented three
(3) types of service participants: Service Consumers, Mediators, and
Service Providers.
Not all stakeholders need to "act" in a SOA context. For example, a
corporate CEO whose been getting a barrage about all this great "SOA stuff"
from industry rags, unsolicited e-mails, telephone calls, etc. may task the
CIO to work with the CFO to develop a roadmap for a possible business and IT
transformation effort to move to SOA-based enterprise and to develop a few
pilot projects to validate the utility of SOA. The CEO is certainly a
stakeholder in that effort, particularly if he/she directs corporate $'s to
fund such an activity, but he/she does not necessarily care about what the
SOA solution looks like under the covers so long as the effort proves that
it can deliver value and make the company more competitive. So here, the
CEO is a stakeholder because he/she has an interest in the outcome of the
project, but, from the RA perspective, the CEO is not a service participant;
at least not yet!
I don't think we need to further confuse the issue by comparing and
contrasting different kinds of providers (e.g., "data provider"). These
providers are either service participants (based on our definition of
service participants) or they are not. And if they are, then they care
about services; otherwise, they do not. In other words, not all things
provided have to be exposed as services.
- Jeff
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Laskey" <>
To: <>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 2:57 PM
Subject: [soa-rm-ra] random question
> Can we have stakeholders who are providers or maintainers of something
> other than services? Or, do we assume by the nature of SOA that if you
> provide something other than a service, that something is a capability
> that must have a service access, so you always end up a service provider?
>
> Ken
>
>
> --
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> / Ken Laskey
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> | MITRE Corporation, M/S H305 phone: 703-983-7934 |
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