According to the Encarta dictionary a stakeholder is a person or group with a direct interest, involvement, or investment in something.

The most important task faced by a Data Miner is to understand the client’s business background and arrive at the business and data mining objectives by asking the relevant, right questions to the right people. And the right people here are the so-called stakeholders; and identifying them makes the job half done!

According to Dorian Pyle, these stakeholders can be divided into five groups:

1. Need Stakeholders – People who actually experience the business problem regularly, in their work. In most situations, they have developed intuitive ideas about what is causing the problem, what is the solution, and how it should be applied. They often expressed their needs as an expected/desired solution, and not as a description of the problem.

2. Money Stakeholders – People who will commit the resources that allow the project to move forward. The business case document written to support modeling/the data mining project is mainly addressed to these people. It is usually not possible for this stakeholder to say “yes” to a project – that is the prerogative of the decision stakeholder - but they can easily say “no” if the numbers aren’t convincing.

3. Decision Stakeholders – People who make the decision of whether to execute the project. Someone very important but difficult to identify as this person is not directly involved with the data miner but relies instead on input from people who have interacted with the data miner.

4. Beneficiary Stakeholders – People who will get the benefit of the results of the data mining project/model; people who will be directly affected. They usually have the ability to promote the success or bring about the failure of many data mining projects.

5. Kudos Stakeholders – People who have sold the project internally. Credit for the project’s success will accrue to them, so will the negative impact of a less than successful project. Very important to understand from these people what it is that determines success, and how the project result will be evaluated.

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