Contextual- and Behavioral-Centric Stakeholder Identification

Proper identification of stakeholders is the first step to bound the system of interest and ultimately to correctly define the problem of concern. Research has traditionally addressed the process of identifying stakeholders using stakeholder-centric methods such as brainstorming (unstructured or with discipline-specific taxonomies). These approaches are grounded on the idea of listing entities that have a relation to the system and then analyze their mutual relationships so that their relative importance with respect to the system can be assessed. Yet, these methods do not provide any mechanism to ensure completeness and thus introduce a high level of uncertainty in the definition of the problem at the beginning of the system life-cycle. The present research proposes instead a contextual- and behavioral-centric approach for stakeholder identification. Using systems thinking the focus is put on understanding all the underlying relationships, be them complex or simple, of the system within its environment and during its existence by comprehensively modeling its socio-technical context and behavior. As a result stakeholders no longer need to be sought, but they comprehensively emerge out of the holistic understanding of the system.