Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans. – Ken Blanchard

Understanding the stakeholders is the half solution for the business needs.

Why stakeholders?

No matter how ideal is your solutions if it doesn’t meet the business needs you have missed the goal. How can we get the business needs? It is´t what we think the needs are? You have to get the right mindset to put your stakeholder in focus and be in touch with them during your work on tasks to insure that your solution is aligned with business needs.

Stakeholders, who are willing to pay for this business functionality because it solves their problems, needs or entertains. All these people, for whom developers, architects, managers work all over the world, are called stakeholders. Project development is all about its stakeholders. And the IT-architects themselves are also among these people.

What is a stakeholder?

A stakeholder is a person, member, system or organization that has rights, shares, claims, or interests concerning the system, its properties meeting their needs and expectations or be affected by an organization’s actions. To put it more simply, the interests of stakeholders have some influence on the system (project), so their opinion should always be taken into account. If you do not do this and overlook one of the key stakeholders, you can ruin the whole project, and it will be much more expensive than just letting a development bug in the project. Stakeholders provide opportunities and limitations for the system and are the source of requirements.
The interesting point is that often, stakeholders are not defined before the decision-making stage. But as soon as the decision is designed, announced, or implemented, everyone affected by this decision will express their opinion. To save the system (project) from potential harm, you are recommended to first answer the questions why and to whom, and only then how?

The best way to minimize disagreement is to make sure that all the stakeholders are in the room. Cheryl Yeoh

So I remember in my lectures at University we had a teacher he always used to ask us questions and we always answered “it depends”. I found this a standard answer which is actually a standard action. Solutions depends on how stakeholders wants solve problms and IT-architects work is to find the right way there.

This phrase (it depends) is my favourite phrase because actually the solutions depend on the environment, the requirements and what the stakeholders willing to pay. As you are IT-architect, you have already experienced of how to build good relationships especially in large organization you need to know people, to make a report between you and them so they can tell you what they really need and don’t resist any change with your system (project) or what are your solution are offering?Cultures in organisations are a big part of how stakeholders express their needs, I have seen in organizations which variants a lot about how they are willing to any changes.