Re: [soa-rm-ra] random question

["Jeffrey A. Estefan" <jeffrey.a.estefan@jpl.nasa.gov>]

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" <klaskey@mitre.org>
To: <soa-rm-ra@lists.oasis-open.org>
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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