Managing Strategic Intelligence: Techniques and Technologies

Information is a key resource of a contemporary organization that deserves effective management. Gaining information and knowledge to develop foresight about future opportunities and threats and quickly reacting to the opportunities and threats becomes a core competency of a winning organization. This is evident (www.50lessons. com) by the following remarks from executives:

It’s important for any organisation to continually reappraise the business environment and how it might change. Thinking about changes that might take place, and being ready to respond to them with well developed plans that are properly executed, means the organisation will move much faster than its competitors to any such scenarios.
~ Paul Skinner, Rio Tinto Plc

Spotting and seizing opportunities that mark major shifts in a company’s strategy takes a lot of courage—but is invaluable to an organisation’s progress.
~ Peter Birch, Land Securities Group

In today’s rapidly changing business world the need for timely and accurate market intelligence will increase. We need to know what our competitors are doing almost before they do.
~ A manager from Royal Life Plc

The analogy between the business world and the battlefield is not something beyond comprehension. Being wary of the enemy is a consistent theme in the writing of the art of war. For example, Sun Tzu (403-221 BC) wrote,1

The reason why the enlightened ruler and the wise general are able to conquer the enemy whenever they lead the army and can achieve victories that surpass those of others is because of foreknowledge.

Know yourself, know your enemies; a hundred battles, a hundred victories; Know your enemy, know yourself, and your victory will not be threatened. Know the terrain, know the weather, and your victory will be complete.

The urgency of effectively managing strategic intelligence is reinforced by two trends witnessed: one is the business environment becomes more turbulent and competition becomes ever fiercer, thus gaining strategic intelligence and sharing knowledge become one of the greatest challenges that faces a company’s senior management. The other is computing technology for information processing that has become more sophisticated and more affordable, which offers great potential to advance the current techniques and technologies used for intelligence gathering, processing, dissemination, and knowledge sharing.

To be more specific, managing strategic intelligence faces the following challenges: firstly, the nature and the importance of strategic intelligence are not often understood by many organizations until crises and problems occurred. Secondly, strategically important information, that is, strategic intelligence, is not a piece of static information that is readily available. It is often scatted in the organization’s internal and external environment, which requires scanning effort. The subjects may be unfamiliar to the inquirer, and the scanning process may be costly. Thirdly, interpreting intelligence is essentially a human cognition and intuition process that is subtle.