Today, businesses face a complex business reality involving numerous and frequent changes. To adapt the company to the changing business environment, companies must keep up with the pace of changes, react quickly to competitors' moves, and try to anticipate their next steps. Companies need to monitor what's happening in the business environment and make strategic, tactical, and operational decisions based on the monitoring results.
The business environment (external to the organization) is monitored through competitive intelligence, which aims to provide information about competitors. There are two main types of competitive intelligence:
Tactical Intelligence - Intelligence aimed at achieving short-term goals and dealing with providing daily solutions, such as collecting information on competitors' current actions, identifying partners, etc.
Strategic Intelligence - Intelligence aimed at achieving long-term goals.
Roles of Strategic Intelligence in an Organization:
Identify all developments in the business environment and understand the potential implications of these developments for the organization. For example, the economic situation in the market, marketing trends, future action plans of competitors, new players in the business environment that may pose a threat, potential customers and new markets, identifying suitable niches and new technologies, and more.
Identify significant long-term risks and threats to the organization. For example, obtain information on technologies that may substitute the technology used by the organization and harm its future profits.
Reach insights on current and future market demands based on the collected information.
Provide supporting information for strategic decision-making in the organization.
Create "future scenarios" through which the organization's management can prepare for their possible occurrence.
It can be said that strategic intelligence has two main objectives:
The first objective is to serve as preventive intelligence for competitors' strategic moves after analyzing information on competitors' activities and threats from them.
The second objective is to provide supporting intelligence for the organization's strategic initiatives by observing various variables in the business environment.
Those responsible for strategic intelligence in the organization should work jointly with senior management to provide them with significant business opportunities, identify new opportunities, and participate with management in assessing the organization's strategies and shaping its future strategy. Despite the great importance of strategic intelligence, many companies tend to focus more on tactical intelligence. Perhaps because strategic intelligence is perceived as "not urgent." Probably because they are busy surviving and reacting to market events, maybe because it's challenging to analyze and understand possible development directions or business opportunities inherent in the business environment, another reason why companies prefer to focus on short-term strategies is that companies usually allocate few resources to the field (for example, assigning the role to just one person), which affects the outputs from the field being limited relative to what's desired.
How can strategic intelligence activities in an organization be made more efficient?
Allocate resources: Give the intelligence bodies in the organization time to collect and organize material.
Create close cooperation and a common language between managers and competitive intelligence personnel where:
Competitive intelligence personnel will offer their insights and products.
Managers will regularly update intelligence personnel on relevant meetings and new partners and share problems and dilemmas in the organization.
Managers in the organization must be able to receive partial information and integrate it into the complete picture of the data.
In conclusion, strategic intelligence looks at the most extended time frame, from the widest angle, and at the highest resolution. It does not deal with static information but contains managerial topics and draws conclusions to achieve long-term goals. It's important to allocate appropriate resources in the organization to create practical strategic intelligence and remember that this intelligence is critical for long-term survival.
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