About A Competitive Intelligence Report

About A Competitive Intelligence Report – June 9, 2009.

The current business environment underlines the penultimate need for the best, most accurate, and compellingly useful information that business leaders can get. The modern business relies on information in the exact same way that our political and military leaders depend on information – it helps them to make the best decisions they can to protect their companies, minimize their competitors’ advantages, and to help them maximize the opportunities available to them.

As this need for cutting edge information has been paired with technologically advanced solutions for developing, acquiring, exchanging, and analyzing information, companies have concentrated their resources on maximizing their ROIs from these sources. This pattern matches exactly the pattern ascribed to our national defense and intelligence spending where our efforts concentrated ever more on technologically acquired intelligence support from satellite feeds, internet scanning, communications intercepts, and so on.

But the comparison doesn’t actually stop there, unfortunately. Because our military, business and political leaders also cut back on those professionals in their companies and in their consultancy ranks whose sole purpose was to validate, verify, network, and develop human intelligence to protect and advance the needs and goals of their respective organizations, there now no longer exists a safeguard against false information, missing information, or faulty analysis.

Militarily and geopolitically I give you the result as 911 and the subsequent global conflicts arising from that dreadful event.

Economically I give you the ascendancy of corporate identity theft as the #1 crime in terms of global financial value, and I also give you the lack of safeguards protecting us against the kind of collapse more than adequately demonstrated by the current recession.

Companies who do not have the kind of access needed to validate their electronically garnered information through established human intelligence sources are destined to suffer overwhelmingly caustic failures in terms of competitive disadvantage and lack of preparation for sudden and dramatic fiscally punishing project failures.

Over the coming weeks I will begin to show my readers what kinds of information companies are missing with some concrete examples. This kind of information is critical to companies, and those companies that will be referenced in the articles would stand to benefit greatly by having the information before it is released to the general public through my report or suffer potentially costly consequences from ignoring the threats raised. To be fair, I will start by showing opportunities being missed by companies within specific industries. I will show telltale signs that competitive intelligence analysts actively research to determine the validity, nature, magnitude, and scope of the opportunities I raise as conversation pieces. After that, the kid gloves come off. World….you’ve been warned.

Business is a single foundation block for all of those things that spark public debate. It is no more and no less important than the other founding stones of countries, nations, communities. It is the basic unit of a nation’s economic engine, the basic unit in career identity, the basic unit in personal financial status, the basis of the tax revenue system, and therefore the financial engine of the government. It provides the necessities and luxuries of society with unparalleled risks, and unimaginable rewards. Our job, our responsibility is to minimize those risks where possible and maximize the benefits and rewards not just today but for the long term benefits imbued in personal, community, regional, and national senses.

Without a balance between the progress of technology and the ever-relevant human contribution then inevitably disaster will only accelerate and broaden in its’ scope, frequency, and potency, testing to our limits as a society to adjust and recover.