Is Stakeholder Engagement important?
Yes, but not as important as Stakeholder Collaboration.

Engagement is about
? communicating,
? influencing, and
? involving in the implementation
of decisions already made …

This is not enough.

Think of Amazon. If Amazon just “involved” customers on Prime, do you think we would have two days (or better) shipping? No, we would have met the wants of the day.

We don’t want to just inform, influence, or involve stakeholders, we want to collaborate with them. In the case of customers, we want to be obsessed with them!

A real-life “internal” example: Big BI project failed after engaging with all the stakeholders, but as things changed, because they didn’t really care, they didn’t know, nor informed the governing team of changes.

This project was fixed when I spent a better part of a year going out, working with the stakeholders, finding and solving their problems, and collaborating with them on determining the entire direction.

? IT needs to be more than aligned with the business,
? but fused. We need everyone on the same team, not
? just participants to maximize business value!