Your First Task: "CIANA$+$PS$"$ the Customer Onboarding Process

Boss.png$"$Onboarding a new customer is a sometimes risky step to take," says your boss, "when we think of all of the sensitivities involved in the aerospace business. Every customer relationship involves proprietary information, whether ours or that customer's. It involves commercial flight quality, safety, security, and airworthiness. And after SUNBURST, Colonial Pipeline, and other recent headline$-$grabbing cyber attacks, we can't just take on any organization as a customer. It's almost simpler to hire a new employee, background checks and "resume inflation," notwithstanding than it is to sign a new customer relationship."

"Everything we need to learn about a prospective customer serves us in several ways. It can help us establish credit and contracting terms; it can help us understand their needs for off$-$our$-$shelf services while identifying opportunities for customized ones. It can help us find opportunities to innovate our own business, which can lead to other new customers. On the dark side, it can lead to opportunities for unscrupulous organizations to try to "pump" us for information about our existing customers, business plans, people, or products."

"And making that "onboarding" decision takes a LOT of coordinated activity across the Fleetwings company$$if we're going to be assured that we've brought a good, solid, valuable, and low$-$risk customer into our family of customers, suppliers, and partners. Some of that activity is simple data gathering, like creating client or customer records in our Customer Relationship Manager platform. Others involve checking out prospective customers' credit ratings, market reputations, and business bona fides. We also talk with the prospect about their anticipated needs to understand how big an account this might become$$or how small it may be$."$

"I want you to take that CIANA$+$PS set of concepts and analyze how we onboard new customer organizations; that will form the foundation with which we can start asking serious questions about information security, safety, and resilience."

"Put it in a table or a diagram$$something we can use as a springboard for further conversation."