IT Support for Market & Competitive Intelligence
Since there is a good chance that market and competitive intelligence would require and use significant IT resources such as communication bandwidth for exchange, data bases, document management systems and web based technologies like portals or Intranet space, IT should be part of any consideration to implement or upgrade any intelligence system or function.
Regardless if an intelligence operation runs on sophisticated web technology entertaining intelligence portals and document management facilities or if marketing & sales groups and management share and explore market & competitive intelligence in a traditional fashion using offline methods like document cascading and hard copy swapping, meetings and the phone system. Chances are that increased noise requires increased and improved IT capacity with systems and support starting with phone systems and e-mail to web browsers and mobility.
Especially when dealing with external documents and internal, confidential literature, IT security would play a vital role of asset protection and legality, counter intelligence and intelligence exchange reliability.
Besides the mentioned standard IT infrastructure capacities that are required for ordinary business processes as much as they are for any internal intelligence efforts (e-mail, network, phoning), a computer based or supported intelligence function and system would rely heavily on IT resources, support and speed.
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Automated Intelligence Gathering
Starting with gathering data, information and transformed intelligence, the intelligence department needs to be concerned beyond established CRM systems and ERP’s. How to collect intelligence with proper processes and IT resources is of major importance as it directly translates to following systems and efficiency of the entire intelligence process.
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Electronic Storage of Competitive Intelligence
When gathering market intelligence it needs to be known how and where the data and information is supposed to be stored. Document management systems, collaboration tools with storage facilities, content management software for corporate Intranets, company networks – there are as many possibilities to store intelligence as there are ideas to process it after storing.
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Market Intelligence Processing
The gathered and stored intelligence would just contribute to the organization’s overhead and dead assets if there was not any effective processing involved in the effort. Processing intelligence in an electronic fashion might be simple access rights execution via company network locations or much more sophisticated activities such as feeding web based portals or customized and personalized employees desktop interfaces.