RE: [soa-rm-ra] random question

["Ellinger, Robert" <robert.ellinger@ngc.com>]

Everyone--In economics there is an concept of externalities, these are
unintended consequences, e.g., a negative externality of building a dam
may be that not enough silt washes down stream to replenish the soil.
So all of the farmers down stream are stakeholders in the dam project
(Be careful how you read that).

Bob 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey A. Estefan [mailto:jeffrey.a.estefan@jpl.nasa.gov] 
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 4:32 PM
To: soa-rm-ra@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [soa-rm-ra] random question

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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