Mandate & Assignment
Your business case’s approval by the management determines your official mandate. Make sure to invest thorough resources into the development in both. This way you will make sure that all decision makers will stand behind the entire process, development and live cycle of the intelligence effort.
Business requirements gathering – The very value of any offer and final intelligence product will be exclusively dictated by the future users requirements. By making this fact known to them they will naturally buy-in to the establishment of your intelligence efforts and motivate them to deliver content as well as the value depends upon it too.
Framework and focus setup – You surely could never satisfy all potential intelligence needs that will ever occur in any part of the organization. A proper value proposition will have to be created and communicated in order to manage both expectations and capacity spent. For example it needs to be clear if you serve and cover competition intelligence and/or competitive intelligence, market intelligence and/or business intelligence in a very broad sense and who your major users, customers will actually be (e.g. Marketing & Sales, Mergers & Acquisitions Department, etc.).
Resource allocation – This just has to be the most important single consideration of any bigger initiative like establishing an intelligence unit or platform or both. The planning process and thus your project initiation documentation need to include quantitative and qualitative measures as well as financial and soft targets.
Based on assumptions drawn from them, hence the value proposition of the intelligence effort, it might be easier or harder to allocate resources in terms of monetary funding and full time equivalents. Fuzzy analytics or sketchy outlooks will destroy any of your efforts before they even started if proper funding is not available.
Cross-comparisons to other departments and the competition might help, better even: spend some time and money with a well introduced intelligence implementation consultant to establish some hard numbers based on real world examples. This should convince anyone along the decision makers. Be prepared for both: tough questions and ruthless cuts. So you better have your homework right.
Systems implementation – Tools and applications used to do the job right at supporting the intelligence effort need to be at your disposal from day one! Make friends with developers and (more important) the tool supporters. You’re gonna appreciate a fast treatment when you need it most.
Sources alignment – Sources that will fill your intelligence depositories and ride on your processes will need to be identified. Never refuse to use support from anyone within your company who knows something about any intelligence source. Intelligence is written with a capital G for GATHERING!
Author: Jens Thieme
Related Topics:
Path Navigation:
