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Perspectives
Intelligent strategies for intelligence and national security
Understanding the geospatial customer ecosystem
The United States (US) defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities face an increasingly complex operating environment. National security threats have transformed and diversified since the 2000s, requiring missions to be fulfilled globally a frequent shifting set of threats from state and non-state actors. Resources have not expanded along these larger mission sets. Instead, federal budgets face intensified scrutiny. This challenge forces national security agencies to prioritize limited resources and seek innovative ways to achieve mission success. An advanced understanding of stakeholders' needs and situational awareness of the cross-sector ecosystem in which the agency operates can help agency personnel succeed in this environment.
Why ecosystem mapping?
Surviving and thriving in a dynamic environment requires that decision-makers see external interactions as more than a series of bilateral supply chain relationships. Instead, decision-makers must understand value creation across a much broader ecosystem of entities. By examining the new and evolving ways value is created within a market ecosystem, decision-makers can achieve a more accurate perception of their own entity's current value. Pairing this perception with an understanding of the diversity of actors and activities in the ecosystem empowers the decision-maker to respond to emerging opportunities and risks.
How can an entity regain influence lost to new disruptive suppliers? How can organizations meet new and evolving customer demands when faced with resource limitations? Whether forging strategic partnerships, investing in key technologies, or increasing impact to customers, ecosystem mapping leverages marketing understanding to help create tangible benefits for organizations.
The geospatial ecosystem is the prime example of a highly dynamic market whose members may be able to benefit from ecosystem mapping-particularly as older high-investment incumbents lose influence, market share, and customer impact to new innovative disruptors.
Looking ahead
Today, the ecosystem contains many hundreds of entities with billions of users across all sectors. This is not limited to the geospatial market but rather mirrors ongoing cross-sector revolutions across the globe.
Traditional supply chain maps and linear customer diagrams no longer reflect reality; these outdated models both stifle opportunity recognition and hinder delivery of currently provided services. Customer ecosystem mapping empowers an entity—regardless of sector—to identify how customer access its services, determine to what end-goal those services contribute and identify valuable cross-sector or cross-function relationship building opportunities.
This clear understanding of the changing customer ecosystem is key to building long-term strategies to promote both customer experience and mission success.

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