A Decision Enhancement Service for Stakeholder Analysis to Achieve Transformations in the Public Sector

Sourcing has become a popular practice for public sector managers aiming for transformations to save costs and improve service delivery. Nevertheless, public sector sourcing often fails due to stakeholder resistance and power struggles, stressing the need for stakeholder analysis. This paper presents a decision enhancement service for STakeholder ANalysis called STAN. The design of STAN is based on sourcing decision issues and observations obtained from public sector sourcing cases, expert interviews and literature. Foundations are derived from the stakeholder and resource dependency theories. STAN enables to identify stakeholder consensus levels that are visualized on sourcing scenario overviews. The assumption is that providing decision-makers insight in stakeholder consensus levels enables them to effectively decide which scenario to pursue and whom to account for. Evaluation results are derived from three public sector sourcing case studies, suggesting that STAN achieves what it is designed for: providing insight in stakeholder consensus levels for decision-making.