The stakeholder concepts, since the appearance of the essay “Stockholders and stakeholders” by Freeman and Reed in 1983, has become widely quoted, used and commented, even if often in a superficial or exploitable way.

This short note is for sure not the adequate place to try and debate the extremely wide theory approach, but aims at giving some hints to policy makers and decision makers engaged in promoting e-business: in other terms, this note is consciously over-simplifying the stakeholder theory and debate.

1. STAKEHOLDER: HINTS TO FOCUS THE MATTER

Let’s try to focus what a stakeholder is. The stakeholder term is commonly used to mean [[a person or organization that has a legitimate interest in a project or entity, that are positively or negatively, favourably or adversely influenced by the project or the entity activities, depending on the fact they have some kind of “stake” in the enterprise]].

More widely, Post, Preston, Sachs (2002) say that "the stakeholders in a corporation are the individuals and constituencies that contribute, either voluntarily or involuntarily, to its wealth-creating capacity and activities, and that are therefore its potential beneficiaries and/or risk bearers."

Main types of stakeholders are:

• Primary stakeholders: those ultimately affected, either positively or negatively by project or entity’s actions.

• Secondary stakeholders: the ‘intermediaries’, that is, persons or organisations who are indirect affected by project or entity’s actions.

• Key stakeholders: (who can also belong to the first two groups) those who have significant influence or importance in project or entity.

Stakeholders can be characterized (and weighted, as we will see in the notes) by three main attributes (Mitchell, Agle, Wood, 1997; Bourne, 2005)

1. Power: some stakeholders (either alone or operating as a group) can kill the project using their own power, other stakeholders have the power to change or damage the project but cannot on their own cause it to be cancelled or fail.

2. Proximity /Legitimacy: this aspect considers how closely a stakeholder is associated with the day-to-day running of the project. The small circle in the centre of the diagram represents the project. The space between the two circles represents the sphere of influence of the project on its whole stakeholder community. The proximity of a stakeholder to the project is represented by how close their segment is to the project in the centre.

3. Urgency / Importance: the width of the arc represents the amount of urgency or importance attributed to a stakeholder from the teams perspective (ie, how likely the stakeholder is to use its power), the wider the segment, the greater the urgency.

Relevance and impact of each stakeholder, according to Mitchell, Agle, Wood (1997) depends on the number of attributes: in other terms, stakeholder salience will be positively related to the cumulative number of attributes that are attributed to the stakeholder itself (by the management of the project or enterprise).

Figure 1. Qualitative classes of stakeholders (Mitchell, Agle, Wood, 1997)

Figure 2. Stakeholder typology: one. two or three attribute presence (Mitchell, Agle, Wood, 1997)

The low salience classes (areas 1 to 3) have only one attribute and can be named as "LATENT STAKEHOLDERS". The medium salient stakeholders (areas 4 to 6), have tow attributes and can be defined "EXPECTANT STAKEHOLDERS", since the have expectations from the project or enterprise. The combination of all three attributes defines highly salient stakeholders, said “DEFINITIVE STAKEHOLDERS”, while absence of attributes excludes players from stakeholder group.

2. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS

Stakeholders need to be strategically managed and taken into account in strategic, tactical, promotional decision by the entity or the project managers: insufficient involvement of stakeholders and infrequent communication with sponsors have been pointed out as one of the leading causes of project failure (Gartner Group, 1996). Stakeholder Management is an important discipline, within which a lot of literature has been produced. The main stakeholder management principles (Clarckson, 1999) can be synthesized as follows:

• management (meaning enterprise or public administration or project management) “should acknowledge and actively monitor the concerns of all legitimate stakeholders, should take their interests appropriately into account in decision-making and operations”;

• management “should listen to and openly communicate with stakeholders about their respective concerns and contributions, and about the risks that they assume because of their involvement with the corporation”;

• management “should adopt processes and modes of behaviour that are sensitive to the concerns and capabilities of each stakeholder constituency”;

• management “should work cooperatively with other entities, both public and private, to insure that risks and harms arising from corporate activities are minimized and, where they cannot be avoided, appropriately compensated”;

• management “should recognize the interdependence of efforts and rewards among stakeholders, and should attempt to achieve a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of corporate activity among them”;

• management “should acknowledge the potential conflicts between (a) their own role as corporate stakeholders, and (b) their legal and moral responsibilities for the interests of stakeholders, and should address such conflicts through open communication, appropriate reporting and incentive systems and, where necessary, third party review”.

In general, the steps of Stakeholder Analysis are drafted below:

• Identify

• Prioritize, understand, visualize

• Engage

• Monitor

In some more detail, the phases are described in the following.

1. Identifying Your Stakeholders: the first step in your stakeholder analysis is to brainstorm who your potential stakeholders are.

2. Prioritize and understand Your Stakeholders: after identifying your potential stakeholders, you should have a long list of people and organizations that are affected by your work. Some of these may have the power either to block or advance it, some may be interested in what you are doing, others may not care. You should analyze and categorise them.

For example, you can map them out on a Power/Interest Grid such as the following, and classify them by their power over the project or enterprise activity and by their interest in it.

Figure 3. Power-interest grid for stakeholder prioritization (www.mindtools.com)

The stakeholder’s position on the grid suggest you the actions you to be undertaken towards each of them: • High power, high interest: these are stakeholders you must fully engage with, and make the greatest efforts to satisfy.

• High power, low interest: these are stakeholders you must put enough work in with to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they can become bored with your message.

• Low power, high interest: keep these stakeholders adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.

• Low power, low interest: monitor these stakeholders, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

Otherwise you can apply the following “Stakeholder power analysis” (Mayers, 2005), as drafted below:

Figure 4. Stakeholder power analysis matrix (Mayers, 2005)

E-BUSINESS POLICY STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT Given some elements about stakeholder theory and management, what follows are hints in the specific field of e-business. The general idea is using analysis tool previously outlined, with a focus on the local features and the specific domain.

We can suggest possible categories of stakeholders to be taken in consideration:

PUBLIC SECT

• Policy makers in relevant sectors (such as local development, tourism, industrial politics, …) in different level of administration (regional, municipal, local, national, international)

• Single and associated local Pas, above all in deprived areas

• Standardization bodies

ACADEMIA

• Academic bodies and university departments working in the fields of:

• computer science • economics • socioeconomic research and local monitoring • local development • legal framework for ICT

PRIVATE SECTOR

• Enterprise associations and SMEs association

• Big industrial player and SMEs in ICT sector

• Chambers of commerce and local development catalysts(enterprise incubators, competitiveness and innovation poles, …)

• Trade unions

• Training bodies

• Professional associations

• Consumer association

• Local banks and association of banks

We can suggest possible lines of action, to be declined and mixed up, in order to engage, keep engaged and monitor relevant stakeholders:

• Fine-tune a list a pros arguments

• Give a statistic scientific bases to your arguments

• Activate press and media actions and refresh them periodically

• Promote face to face meetings with “definitive” stakeholders (see figure 2)

• Find an influential champion and a spokesman

• Use good practices, cases, stories to compare with other similar/homologue realities

• Monitor and give evidence to the evolution of the policy, the progress of impacts, the evolution of stakeholders’ attitude

• Use participatory policy-making as long as possible

Finally, we can suggest an operational tool to brainstorm about stakeholders: the following “[www.cprd.uiuc.edu/Pep/docs/PolicyStakeholders.RTF Policy Stakeholder Review and Discussion Worksheet]", proposed by CPRD at the University of Illinois (www.cprd.uiuc.edu).