are you talking about front wheel or rear wheel?
For rear wheel its only needed if there's no centerstand.
For front wheel its only needed if there's no good support under the engine/frame to put a jack of some type to lift the bike.
so for the ST1100, neither of those conditions apply.
when I rode sportbikes they often had no centerstand, so I used a rear stand.
They also had the pipes running under the frame in a "V" shape so there was no good place to jack the front end up reliably. It may have been possible to lift the bike by putting the jack under the pipes, but I never had the nerve to try it and risk either folding my pipes up by mistake or have the bike tip off the narrow lift point. So I used a front stand, that I configured out of regular pipes and fittings from Home Depot.
I also alternatively solved the front end lifting issue by running a cable through the front of the frame and lifting the frame with a come along attached to a horizontal beam in my garage. That worked too and had some advantages and some disadvantages compared to the typical floor lift. For example, if I ever had to remove the steering stem or adjust the steering stem bearings (which I didn't fortunately) the normal lift wouldn't work, as it holds the bike up at the bottom of the stem. The downside of the cable lift is the bike swings a little on the cable since its suspended in air from above.
