Back on May 6, 2009 the Global Intelligence Association (GIA) White Paper “World-Class Market Intelligence - From Firefighters to Futurists” was introduced with a Webinar.

Webinar Outline

• GIA MI Roadmap
  • 6 Key Success Factors for Intelligence
  • 5 Levels towards World Class Intelligence Operations
• Company Cases
  • Case Vopak: Building a Sophisticated Intelligence Operation with the Help of GIA’s World-Class MI Framework (René Loozen)
  • Case Ciba (Part of BASF): Taking an Existing Intelligence Operation to the Next Level (Jens Thieme)

White Paper Executive Summary

The World Class MI Framework created by Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) has been developed to help organizations achieve three types of benefits from a systematic intelligence operation:

• Better and faster decisions
• Time and cost savings
• Organizational learning and new ideas

The World Class MI Framework builds on six Key Success Factors that an organization needs to develop in parallel in order to bring their MI operation to a level where it compares to the most advanced companies in the world. The Key Success Factors are defined as follows:

1. Intelligence Scope: Start from small and redefine the Scope along the way
2. Intelligence Process: Design and implement MI Processes that are integrated with decision making, i.e. Decision Point Intelligence
3. Intelligence Deliverables: Design and produce concrete MI Deliverables
4. Intelligence Tools: Adopt a specialized MI Tool that enables global sharing of intelligence
5. Intelligence Organization: Build a results-driven Organization with optimized resourcing
6. Intelligence Culture: Create an intelligence Culture in your organization

The World Class MI Framework further divides each six Key Success Factors of MI development into five levels of maturity, where the levels range from “Firefighters” (Level 1, the beginners), to “Futurists” (Level 5, the most advanced organizations with regards to the level and maturity of their intelligence activity). Ideally, all success factors will be developed in parallel, since they are highly inter-dependent.

However, most organizations find it easiest to first build up the “technical” MI capabilities, while the softer success factors such as MI organization and MI culture, often lag behind.

How the World Class MI Framework can be leveraged for successful MI development in practice is demonstrated in the end of the paper through two case examples, Vopak and Ciba (Part of BASF).

Find more details and direct downloads here.