Does Your Business Radar Work? / Opportunity Systems for Intelligence
Several problems present in the field of intelligence and early warning system are examined and a number of concepts are proposed that can be institutionalized in order to overcome these problems. A potential solution is offered via integrating the areas of competitive intelligence, balanced scorecard, and business performance indicators in order do develop a comprehensive early warning capacity.
Intelligence concerns the awareness and knowledge of the external business environment. The definition that is used here is that business intelligence is a systematized and continuous approach to focus, collect, analyze, communicate, and use information about customers, competitors, distributors, technology, political issues, macroeconomic issues, and political issues in order to increase the competitiveness of the organization.
Many organizations state that they rely mostly on informal mechanisms to support this external knowledge. This disproportionate reliance on informal mechanisms is a vestige of management thinking from the previous century.
Key Statements from the Document
- Business/Competitive Intelligence: systematized and continuous approach to focus, collect, analyze, communicate, and use information about customers, competitors, distributors, technology, macroeconomic issues and political issues in order to increase the competitiveness of the organization.
- Porter’s thinking regarding the nature of competitive strategy and competitive advantage provided the starting point for BI/CI.
- Formalized intelligence and EWOS systems are needed in today’s competitive arena.
EWS Purpose: Surprise avoidance through risk identification and monitoring of these risks and warning should any threat occur. - Early warning system is a systematized business control system for handling external risks and avoiding surprises in a proactive and continuous manner.Literature on political science, history and military intelligence give insight into the combination of these three areas.
- EWOS must be approached from a business/decision perspective and not from a technology perspective.
- Targets for focused EWOS are set by identifying a chain-ofevents leading up to a specific situation that might pose a threat or an opportunity.
- Unfocused EWOS do not have specific targets. Their purpose is to detect new issues and events previously unforeseen or understood.
- To detect weak signals, companies need to expand their business environment scanning/intelligence attention in a wider swath than just their immediate business environment.
- Combining focused and unfocused EWOS with scenario analysis is the basis for a comprehensive EWOS with the purpose of detecting both identified possible threats and opportunities as well as identifying new, previously unforeseen possible threats and opportunities.
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