The Stakeholder Onboarding Model: Addressing the Challenges of Multi-Stakeholder Onboarding

Abstract

Today, more and more digital services get designed to address multi-stakeholder challenges easing transactions and communication along supply chains. Here, it is essential that the digital services address the underlying challenges and satisfy all relevant stakeholders sufficiently. Especially, the multi-stakeholder onboarding is essential as a problem - digital service fit by itself does not guarantee the support and adoption of all stakeholders. Given the stakeholders’ unique roles and responsibilities they all pose different needs and requirements complicating the onboarding process. To ensure that the essential stakeholder requirements are met, we propose the adoption of the Stakeholder Onboarding Model (SOM) when designing multi-stakeholder projects, such as digital services. It is a step-by-step guide towards designing attractive and customized digital services to the network at question. The SOM adopts and combines the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Stage-Gate Model (SGM) towards a continuous improvement and reflection cycle. It is intended to guide the stakeholder management process from the design to the implementation of the digital solution. This paper adopts and evaluates the SOM with a practical use case from port logistics. Subsequently, its usefulness, applicability, and generality get discussed leading to the first iterations of the SOM.