For business managers curious about where or how they can make use of corporate intelligence, or anybody exploring it as a possible career, I hope our series on “What is corporate intelligence?” will provide an informative, practitioner’s perspective of how we operate.
Corporate intelligence (CI) firms supply actionable information to business managers when they need information to make critical decisions.
- This begs lots of other questions: Which businesses use CI?, when?, why?, how? Why can’t companies do it for themselves?
- You may also ask: What sort of information do CI firms gather, how do they gather
it?, who do they recruit, etc?
We can answer those questions in future articles. Let it suffice for now that we are only talking about situations where management urgently need information to make a critical business decision, and the nature of the decision-point that confronts them means that the information they require is difficult to find through conventional means
Corporate
As the name suggests, the typical customers of CI firms are companies. This includes trusts, foundations, companies, partnerships etc.
CI firms are close relatives are private investigators; who supply actionable information that natural persons need to resolve critical personal problems.
We are more distantly related to national spy agencies; who supply actionable information to the political leaders of sovereign nations when they need to make critical decisions in the national interest.
The three disciplines have different capabilities, resources and objectives:
Spy agencies act under a mandate from their government, and are resourced accordingly.
By contrast, CI firms do not enjoy a national mandate, they may even be unregulated, or just lightly regulated, but we must operate within the laws of the countries where we operate, notably those that restrict how we can legally gather information, and those designed to protect the privacy and personal data of people. CI firms rely on different resources to national spy agencies, have different competencies, and most avoid getting involved in any
matters that have national or military sensitivity.
The lines between private investigators and CI firms can become blurred – after all it is
people who make the key decisions in companies. But while their competencies may similar, in complex corporate transactions or disputes, the technical capabilities and corporate experience of CI firms matter more.
So from the point of view of people trying to understand the corporate intelligence sector this is the first important differentiator – who does the CI firm act for/ who are their clients?
Intelligence
‘Intelligence’ is a concept originating from the military context, where Commanders sought information about their enemies to plan strategy and their best deployment of limited resources. Accordingly, it was originally defined as the PROCESS of collecting, organizing, and disseminating information for decision-makers.
As technology advanced to enhance the capture, storage and technical analysis of large datasets, the definition of intelligence evolved to refer to the PRODUCT, or the output from that process of analysis.
So Intelligence can refer to both the output from the process, and the process itself. To refine what it means within the context of CI, we would add:
- Intelligence is the process we go through to gather and filter information, the methods
we use to impose structure by assembling all the puzzle pieces just as you do when
completing a jigsaw puzzle. When we run out of puzzle pieces we are left with gaps in
our knowledge, but the shape of these gaps help CI firms to frame new questions. - It is only by asking the right questions that CI firms can hope to find ways to either
locate, deduce or to generate from proxy sources, the missing information –information that was always going to be difficult to obtain using conventional research
means. - This process is not linear, but rather an iterative cycle that progressively enables the CI
firms to frame better questions with each cycle. - Lacking the mandate and resources of spy agencies, CI firms know that they may never
fill all the gaps, but then we not need to find information to fill every gap, we only need
to prioritise and try understand the gaps that are helpful to our client’s strategic
objectives. - Each additional nugget of information improves the clarity of the picture that delivers
actionable Intelligence (the output of the intelligence process) that enable
management to make an informed decision at a decisions at a critical juncture for the
business.
The CI Value Chain
From the point of view of people trying to understand the corporate intelligence sector this is another important differentiator – where does the CI firm sit in the value chain?
