Business stakeholder analyzer: An experiment of classifying stakeholders on the Web

  • Authors:
  • Wingyan Chung;Hsinchun Chen;Edna Reid

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Operations and Management Information Systems, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053;Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Management Information Systems, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721;Department of Library Science, Clarion University, Clarion, PA 16214

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

As the Web is used increasingly to share and disseminate information, business analysts and managers are challenged to understand stakeholder relationships. Traditional stakeholder theories and frameworks employ a manual approach to analysis and do not scale up to accommodate the rapid growth of the Web. Unfortunately, existing business intelligence (BI) tools lack analysis capability, and research on BI systems is sparse. This research proposes a framework for designing BI systems to identify and to classify stakeholders on the Web, incorporating human knowledge and machine-learned information from Web pages. Based on the framework, we have developed a prototype called Business Stakeholder Analyzer (BSA) that helps managers and analysts to identify and to classify their stakeholders on the Web. Results from our experiment involving algorithm comparison, feature comparison, and a user study showed that the system achieved better within-class accuracies in widespread stakeholder types such as partner-sponsor-supplier and media-reviewer, and was more efficient than human classification. The student and practitioner subjects in our user study strongly agreed that such a system would save analysts' time and help to identify and classify stakeholders. This research contributes to a better understanding of how to integrate information technology with stakeholder theory, and enriches the knowledge base of BI system design. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.