To most, “Intelligence” is the Cloak and Dagger images of bygone days. In truth, it is the gathering of information on your competitors which is collected efficiently and accurately through total honest and ethical methods. This means that each business transaction reveals some data. By understanding the transaction, you can locate the intelligence source.
What exactly is Competitive Intelligence?
According to the research of one of the leading international authorities on business and competitive intelligence:
“Business intelligence is any combination of data, information, and knowledge concerning the business environment in which a company operates that, when acted upon, will confer a significant competitive advantage or enable sound decisions to be made. Thus, for practitioners, the term encompasses both competitive intelligence and knowledge management. Involvement in business intelligence operations will enable the organization to, inter alia:
- anticipate and manage risk
- seek opportunities and new markets
- take action before competitors
- innovate
- exploit competitors’ weaknesses
- improve planning and decision-making
The term is also widely accepted as being concerned with information technology solutions for transforming the output from large data collections into so-called intelligence; usually through the integration of sales, marketing, servicing, and support activities. Also loosely referred to as customer relationship management, it covers such activities as data mining and enterprise reporting, and the associated software. Those involved in this form of business intelligence tend to regard it as simply one aspect of knowledge management. Systems based on such software have replaced the term Executive Information Systems.”
-Vernon Prior, author of the article, “Language of BI”, which is posted as a .pdf file at the website for The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, www.scip.org
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