The ICT sector has no fixed place on the map. A software company has no local residents in the classic sense, no emissions that a municipality measures, no permit that a councillor signs. Yet the societal exposure is large, and that ratio is growing increasingly skewed: the pace at which a product gains influence over people is higher than the pace at which those people can form an opinion about it. An app that reaches a large part of a generation in a short time, an algorithm that prepares decisions once made by people, a data collection that keeps expanding without there ever having been a visible moment at which consent was asked for it. There is no factory gate to stand in front of, and that makes the question of who the stakeholder actually is harder than in sectors with a physical footprint.
The first group is the users, and that group rarely coincides with the customer. A social media platform sells to advertisers, but the people who experience the most inconvenience or benefit from the product are the users who do not pay. Anyone who wants a clear picture of that difference needs to know what you want to know from employees just as well as from the people who use the product, because both groups are often recognisable by their dissatisfaction with the same internal decision.
The second group is the organisation's own development team. In a sector where the product largely consists of decisions made by engineers, part of the societal responsibility lies with people who rarely sit at a boardroom table. What a development team thinks of a feature that has just been rolled out is a signal that is often available sooner than what an external party thinks of it, and that sometimes makes it the most underestimated part of the difference that a survey reveals.
The third group consists of regulators and legislators, a group that is growing faster in the ICT sector than in sectors with a longer regulatory history. Data protection, algorithmic accountability, market power: topics that have shifted from a technical detail to a political matter without the company itself changing anything about its product. Companies in the financial sector have known this pattern for longer; anyone who wants to see how a sector deals with regulation as a fixed stakeholder will find a comparable structure in the external parties that determine trust in financial services.
The fourth group is less visible but no less present: the suppliers and partners a platform depends on, who themselves often also have to think about their own stakeholders. Cloud infrastructure runs on energy, and the question of who has a say in that touches on topics described in the parties that determine the playing field in the energy sector, even though a software company rarely sees itself as an energy consumer.
The fifth group is the broader society without a direct relationship to the product: people who have never logged in, but who are nevertheless affected by a decision that was prepared by an algorithm. This group has no account, no contract and no permit to point to, and is therefore the easiest to forget and the hardest to reach with a standard survey.
In sectors with a physical location, there is usually a fixed core of stakeholders that rarely shifts: residents around a construction site, for example, as seen with the parties around a construction project asking for attention. In the ICT sector, that core shifts per product and per moment. A privacy incident suddenly shifts attention to regulators; a rollout that backfires shifts it to users; an acquisition shifts it to competitors and regulators at the same time. Anyone who sticks to one fixed list misses the moment at which another group becomes the most important one.
What goes wrong more often in this sector than anywhere else is the small commitment that is quietly let go. An announced feature that is "coming soon" and still has not appeared a year later, a privacy promise that is technically still accurate but has been hollowed out in practice, a support promise that has been adjusted in the fine print. Such moments carry more weight than a large investment that falls through, precisely because they are small enough to disappear without any announcement. Anyone who wants to follow that pattern needs more than an opinion; they need a fixed place where commitments are placed next to their outcome.
This page describes who should be at the table in the ICT sector, not how much time or capacity that conversation will cost internally. That is a different question, and FTE TO AI has a different work scan for that: it calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, so that it becomes clear how much room is left to actually speak with those stakeholders instead of merely identifying them.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.