Week 2 Discussion Question 1:
Imagine you have been hired by the University of Phoenix IT department. Your first task is to determine the business requirements for enhancing the Online Learning System which is used by students, facilitators and administrators. To do this, you decide to hold a brainstorming session.
Answer the following questions about your brainstorming session: • Which stakeholders will you invite to your brainstorming session? Be specific on your stakeholders. Why? • What questions you will ask them? Why are these questions important?
Answer:
Before discussing the objectives of Online Learning System, I find it important to define the definition of stakeholders. Stakeholders basically refers to a person, group or an organization that has direct or indirect effect on an organization as it can affect or be affected by the company’s actions and policies. Usually key stakeholders in a business organization include creditors, directors, consumers, employees, owners and community from which the business draws its resources.
The Online Learning System is usually used by the students, facilitators and administrators but it somehow affects the technical staff and to some extent the president also. Being focused, facilitators, students and administrators are the key stakeholders in this case because they are the ones who use the Online Learning System on daily bases and by implementing a user friendly system they will be benefitted to a greater extent. However, president can also be counted as a stakeholder as they are the ones who over sees the organization. On the other hand the technical staff can also be counted as stakeholder as they know the overall problem that the students and faculty is facing. But I will keep my focus mainly on students, facilitators and administrators because they use this system more frequently and may be able to provide better details on areas that need to be enhanced and worked on.
As far as the questions I will want to ask them is concerned, I would put forward the following questions: i. What are the major goals of the project and how well do we want to make use of the available opportunity? ii. What are the basic problems we want to looks upon and resolve and the target we want to achieve? iii. How to make the material online more clear and transparent in order for it to be more easily understandable? iv. What are the steps that could be taken to make the online environment more user friendly? By putting these questions we can judge the feasibility of the online Learning System and will help understand the loose and gain of the implementation.

Reference:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CGoQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rwjf.org%2Ffiles%2Fresearch%2F49951.stakeholders.final.1.pdf&ei=iRlpT5asMYawsgKI_IyTCQ&usg=AFQjCNE7RXhawWV4dXKFmtB8D4QstjYRNw&sig2=L3QB_KZ3N4UvvdKCvsMrJQ