The IT professional as stakeholder

The concept of stakeholder is well established in the field of IS, yet the IT person's role as a stakeholder is often ignored because stakeholders on the customer side are, appropriately, regarded as more important than stakeholders on the supplier side. Focusing on various IT stakeholders can give us a fresh perspective on many issues of concern. Tools and techniques for stakeholder analysis, currently trained exclusively on customer-side stakeholders, can possibly lead to useful approaches for analyzing IT roles, including: understanding the skills and abilities needed to succeed in the IT profession, analyzing role profiles, supporting work satisfaction and staff retention, improving individual and team performance, facilitating group-work, particularly (globally) distributed teams. In particular, an analysis of stakeholder relationships can lead to a conceptual framework that will help researchers and educators to understand and communicate the ways IT professionals work with other categories of stakeholders in different development contexts.