A systemic method for organisational stakeholder identification and analysis using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (original) (raw)
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Purpose and perspective: using soft systems methods in stakeholder analysis
Sustainable development has brought with it a broader consideration of the role of different stakeholders. Considerable scholarship has gone into demonstrating that purpose and perspective matter, and that stakeholder groupings based on these can be much more complex than basic social or economic variables might suggest. Yet an examination of the stakeholder analysis tools in the management literature reveals simplistic assumptions and boundary judgements, and a reification of purpose that conceals stakeholder assumptions, values and goals. In this paper, we explore an alternative form of stakeholder analysis, based on Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology. At its core is a suggestion that a central difficulty with standard stakeholder analysis is that sustainability is not framed in the same way by different stakeholders and it is unreasonable to analyse their stake in it as though their framing was identical. The paper describes how some of the methods developed within SSM can be applied to make stakeholder analysis more powerful and more flexible, and discusses some of the implications for CSR and sustainability.
Contextual- and Behavioral-Centric Stakeholder Identification
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Proper identification of stakeholders is the first step to bound the system of interest and ultimately to correctly define the problem of concern. Research has traditionally addressed the process of identifying stakeholders using stakeholder-centric methods such as brainstorming (unstructured or with discipline-specific taxonomies). These approaches are grounded on the idea of listing entities that have a relation to the system and then analyze their mutual relationships so that their relative importance with respect to the system can be assessed. Yet, these methods do not provide any mechanism to ensure completeness and thus introduce a high level of uncertainty in the definition of the problem at the beginning of the system life-cycle. The present research proposes instead a contextual- and behavioral-centric approach for stakeholder identification. Using systems thinking the focus is put on understanding all the underlying relationships, be them complex or simple, of the system within its environment and during its existence by comprehensively modeling its socio-technical context and behavior. As a result stakeholders no longer need to be sought, but they comprehensively emerge out of the holistic understanding of the system.
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The idea of accommodating worldviews in problem structuring is a common approach across many methodologies. A key assumption of this research is the idea that actors must reach a point where a debate about change, through an accommodation of worldviews, can occur. This paper looks at a field study where actors actively used their declared worldviews against each other to argue for change. Even though this process led to a stalling of the method, an argument is made that there is still much to be learned from actors who ...
The Use of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) As A Tool For Investigation
1. The Purpose of SSM Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was devised by Checkland (1981) and elaborated by Checkland & Scholes (1990) to provide a tool for investigating an unstructured problem situation. SSM is not a system design tool, but a tool for system requirements investigation. Unlike systems analysis tools, such as entity-relationship modelling or data-flow diagrams, which allow the designer to model how the system should operate, SSM questions what operations the system should perform and, more importantly, why. Thus SSM provides a "soft" investigation (into what the system should do) which can be used to precede the "hard" investigation (into how the system should do it). Figure 1 illustrates the purpose of SSM; it should be noted that SSM does not produce either a set of information system requirements or an information system design. SSM produces a set of feasible and culturally-acceptable actions which can be taken to improve the problem situation. These actions may be used to produce a set of information systems requirements, but it is more helpful to see them as a set of organisational process improvements, where a process is a set of organisational tasks performed purposefully by a human actor or actors.
A Component-Based Method for Stakeholder Analysis
Stakeholders can facilitate or hinder an organisation's performance significantly. The identification and management of the stakeholder is one of the key business activities for organisations. Although stakeholder identification is the first step of stakeholder analysis, there is little attention paid to the methodologies for stakeholder identification. This paper uses a system view point and proposes a component-based method for stakeholder identification and analysis, which focuses on the artefacts as linkage between different subsystems of an organisation. Stakeholders, identified through components, include the processors who produce, use, communicate and control the component making process. The identified stakeholders can then be mapped into a stakeholder relationship map according to the components that are being used to identify the stakeholders. This method provides a novel approach to identify stakeholders through artefacts and define stakeholder relationship, through ...
Soft Systems Methodology - An Introduction
Computer Science/Roskilde University, Spring 1994, 1994
This is a note for the lecture on Checkland's Soft System Methodology (SSM) held on March 29, 2000 on Department of Computer Science, Roskilde University. It is a short introduction to SSM based on two primary literature's, - Checkland, Peter: Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Chichester, West Sussex, UK, 1981, (referred to as SSM, 81), and - Checkland, Peter, and Ji Scholes: Soft Systems Methodology in Action. Chichester, West Sussex, UK, 1990, (referred to as SSM, 90). First some background for SSM is given followed by a description of SSM as described in (SSM, 81) and the revised SSM as described in (SSM, 90). SSM and the construction of Information Systems (IS) is briefly mentioned and, as a summary, a table of key concepts and techniques/guidelines is presented. Finally, the philosophy of SSM and the Work Analysis' critique of SSM is described.