What do competitive intelligence professionals need to know?

There are few examples in the history of business where managers and employees were trusted with new tasks with such minimal training and background to guide them. Yet this is the case with the majority of competitive intelligence professionals. The results are several myths and misconceptions regarding what competitive intelligence professionals need or need not know. So let’s set the record straight.

Competitive intelligence professionals come from a variety of functional and professional backgrounds and even more diverse academic backgrounds. They do not all have MBAs. The uniquely eclectic nature of competitive intelligence makes general knowledge critical. Knowledge of cultures, psychology, economics, and history all play an important role in preparing competitive intelligence assessments. An ideal preparation for CI professionals is in-depth industry knowledge combined with specialized training. This combination is far superior to intelligence background or MBA alone.

The prominent role of accumulated industry knowledge is one reason why any attempt to teach CI as a pure "academic" discipline is doomed. Our experience in academia (Ben Gilad had been a business professor for 18 years) and in the government (Jan Herring has been a senior CIA analyst) as well as in the business world (Leonard Fuld established his CI research firm in 1979), suggests to us the following: undergraduates with (hypothetically speaking) a BA in "Intelligence Studies," or a young graduate of an MBA program with a specialization in "Intelligence," or a retired intelligence operator/analyst from a military/government circle, will all be at a disadvantage compared with a seasoned manager with just a few weeks of our rigorous training in basic intelligence theory and practices.

Most companies prefer to select competitive intelligence professionals from within, after the employee has a few years of industry experience, rather than recruit a CI expert from the outside. The reason is the different shape of the learning curves for intelligence and industry knowledge. It takes longer to master the intricacies of an industry than intelligence cycle’s basic principles. There is also agreement that the CI manager needs managerial skills - communication ability, political astuteness, etc., but all these are secondary. The most significant component is the ability of the CI professional to provide management with insights derived from developments in the industry.

Targeting competitive intelligence on the evolution of one’s industry sets the competitive intelligence professional apart from market research, marketing or product managers and other internal functions in charge of some aspects of the external competitive environment. The CI professional is a convergence point to all data and analyses from other "sensory" functions. He or she is the only insider with a holistic view of the industry. They require special advanced training to identify risks and opportunities from the stream of human and published data before the competition does.

There are three skills at the core of competitive intelligence:

1. An ability to collect intelligence from human sources (internal or external).
2. An ability to synthesize (rather than just analyze) disparate industry developments, i.e., see the forest from the trees.
3. An ability to derive implications, and identify the appropriate actions for one’s company or client.

While competitive intelligence professionals may not posses all three skills simultaneously, a CI function should.

Like other interdisciplinary fields, many of the tools used by competitive intelligence professionals were developed elsewhere but applied uniquely. Governments and Library/Information Sciences alike have developed many of the collection and monitoring tools used by CI professionals. Michael Porter, working in the field of strategy, developed competitive analysis, which is used as the basis for our CI analysis module. Scenario planning and business war games, part of our advanced applications module, were developed in the military. However, the unique expertise of the competitive intelligence professional comes in two areas of application:

1. Predicting the moves of High Impact Players (competitors, customers, regulators, potential acquirers, suppliers, substitute producers, etc).
2. Interpreting weak signals for early warning regarding industry-wide developments.

Competitive intelligence professionals must keep the following distinction clear in their minds: To become intelligence - as contrasted with information- professionals, they must bring perspective to their reports. Intelligence is information that was placed in context which made it relevant for decision making. Intelligence is perspective.