Model-based Systems Architecting

5Understanding Interactions with Stakeholders: Operational Architecture

5.1. Why understand interactions with stakeholders?

Operational architecture, or equivalently operational analysis, intends to precisely understand the interactions over time between the system of interest and the external systems of its reference environment, or equivalently of its stakeholders. Motivations of environment architecture, as already discussed in section 4.1, also apply in exactly the same terms – mutatis mutandis – to operational architecture. As for stakeholder identification, any forgetfulness, misunderstanding or error that could occur during the operational architecture process may indeed have disastrous – and usually costly – consequences on a system under development.

As previously pointed out in section 4.1, we must indeed understand that any function and any component of a system ultimately intend to provide an answer to a stakeholder and thus are always involved in the different interactions that are taking place between the system and its environment (of reference). We can therefore just not design – at least with a reasonable level of confidence – the different functions or components of a system without understanding the missions to which they contribute. Many design mistakes are typically done when designers do not have any precise idea of the various operational contexts in which the system they are developing will be used. We can thus only stress here the imperious necessity ...