What do you and your colleagues know about your environment when making critical decisions regarding your organizations future? How can you act more effectively based on better intelligence? Apply Competitive Intelligence.
Society has evolved at record speed from the
Industrial Age > Information Age > Intelligence Age
We are faced with on the one hand information overload and on the other a quickly changing world.
Source: Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 2002
In order to take necessary steps for adapting to the environment which your organization exists, it is vital to identify critical challenges (“critical intelligence questions”) affecting your organization, and gaining knowledge of the options you must consider for the future. You don’t want even more “information overload”, you want incite (information analyzed and applied to your situation) to make the critical decisions affecting your organizations strategic and tactical future.
According to SCIP (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) Competitive Intelligence is “the process of monitoring the competitive environment. CI is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing information that can affect a organization’s plans, decisions, and operations.” The bottom line is that it although needed, Competitive Intelligence (CI”) is only of value if it supports decision makers take informed action based on better knowledge of their environments needs and possibilities.
The process for developing relevant intelligence relies on an open dialogue with decision makers and focus on:
- assessing concerns,
- planning an intelligence strategy,
- collecting data,
- compiling it into information,
- analyzing it so that it gives knowledge,
- that is communicated, and
- applied in the decision making process who with this intelligence can act tactically in the short term and strategically for the developments in the future.
New concerns that arise along the intelligence cycle can lead to an assessment of new concerns that must as well or instead be addressed. Intelligence tasks can be on going monitoring and reporting or they can be quick projects, but they need to address the critical strategic concerns of decision makers. In companies as well it needs to address the operative or tactical needs of sales & marketing, and product development so that they as well can at an earlier stage anticipate and meet changes in their environment.
Source: Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 2002
To learn more about Competitive Intelligence
contact Sven-Erik Pihl.
Print)
)