On Aug 25, 2006, at 4:31 PM, Jeffrey A. Estefan wrote:
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
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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