Here's one way to think about positioning EA Services your customers:
The customers for EA are all the participants that may be impacted by services provided by EA (one or more individuals) within a given scenario (or set of scenarios). One Example: Suppose EA services are requested for a small manufacturing organization to look at their product development capabilities. Depending on the scope of the engagement / problem, the EA may need to consider the external consumers of the product(s) in addition to the following internal customers of his/her services: (executive mgmt, functional areas like finance, marketing, legal, compliance, product mgmt, product dev staff, and operations staff) and even the market (if publicly traded). At first glance, this may appear too large (btw, I didn't even include the partners and the environment - from a sustainability perspective). It's complicated and filled with uncertainty...an ideal situation for EA :)
In specific, think about aligning your customers and markets w/in the scope of EA:
When examining the categorization of the supply chains and value chains (via markets and segmentation), the mapping exercise can get even further complicated when trying to capture, map, and align the patterns of desired outcomes across all these "customers". This is where the EA can provide a lot of value to CMOs and product marketing/dev teams.
But, it's complicated...I just want to focus on simple solutions and pragmatic approaches:
The above responses would appear to bely the notion of simplicity in providing a pragmatic approach. The scenario for product development is by its very nature a highly complex orchestration of distributed activities and jobs. There are always ways of abstracting complexity through agreed upon reference models and assumptions, but then the question of risk comes into play as to the precision required to deliver the right products for the markets and/or market segments.
Bottom Line: I think the EA can provide services to address any level of complexity, but the EA also needs to provide a balanced set of insights on risk to guide the decision makers appropriately.
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