Information and Communications Technology for Competitive Intelligence : 9781591401421

Competitive Intelligence can be described as producing and processing information about the environment of an organization for strategic purposes. To formulate a strategy, an organization needs to collect and process information about its environment—about, for instance, competitors, customers, suppliers, governments, technological trends or ecological developments. Collecting and processing environmental information has always been important. However, because of the increasing complexity and dynamics of the environment, the pressure to produce relevant, timely ‘actionable’ intelligence increases as well. To collect and process strategically relevant environmental information in a structured fashion, a large number of organizations are currently implementing a competitive intelligence function.

To structure the process of competitive intelligence, several authors propose a cycle of four stages. This “intelligence cycle” contains the following stages:

1. Direction. In this stage the organization determines its “strategic information requirements.” It determines about what aspects in the environment data should be collected.

2. Collection. In this stage, it is determined what sources can be used for data collection and the data are actually collected.

3. Analysis. In the analysis stage the data collected in the previous stage are analyzed to assess whether they are useful for strategic purposes. Here, the actual “production” of intelligence (data relevant for strategy) takes place.

4. Dissemination. The intelligence (produced in stage 3) is forwarded to the strategic decision-makers and used to formulate their strategic plans.