“Stakeholders” is a 25-year-old piece of management-speak that has been adopted enthusiastically by some software professionals. Thus “Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success“:
The term was introduced in a seminal book by R. Edward Freeman called Strategic Management (1984). The word stakeholder was used to stand in contrast to the neoclassical view of the firm as catering to stockholders. Freeman used the term stakeholder analysis to remind management that it was in the long-term interests of the company to pay attention to the interests of those who have an impact on or are impacted by the activities of the company. The present article uses the “stakeholder analysis” concept to extend the focus of user experience practitioners beyond the end user, to the organizational context of the [software] project.
This leads to a pun that (like most flashes of inspiration) is obvious in retrospect:
The people who have come to rely on features that are actually implementation errors are called ‘mistakeholders’.
(The link attributes this to Chip Morningstar on friam, 2/5/2010, though I haven’t been able to find it there.)
Generalizing back from software design to social and cultural change in general, it’s worth noting that most of the people affected by most policy changes are in some sense mistakeholders. This follows logically from the fact that most of the consequences of any policy are unanticipated adaptations and interactions.
Publishing opportunity of the day: there appear to be more than 18,000 books about stakeholders, but none so far about the (arguably much larger category of) mistakeholders. Open opportunities include Mistakeholder strategy: the world of emergent profits, or Monetizing unintended consequences: How to win by targeting mistakeholders.