The Missing Piece for Persistent Anchoring of Customer Integration in Organizational Processes

Abstract

Even though customer integration (CI) is very important for the development of products and services, it remains an immense challenge in practice due to fragmented approaches. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach is required to improve the industrial applicability of CI without falling into a complexity trap. This article contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing an integral view of the problem through action research with the aim of understanding the complexity of industrial implementations of CI. The results of a multidisciplinary requirements analysis are processed in the form of a meta-model to gain a deeper understanding of the problem. The proposed meta-model decomposes the problem to obtain the targeted holistic view of the underlying complexity of CI in product development. Organizations can use the resulting system view to adopt a multidisciplinary, more systematic approach to CI. This will enable the development of suitable CI processes and methods for industrial applicability of CI and the management of associated knowledge from customers.