Intelligence Provider Evaluation

 

Business need to know what competitive intelligence is out there, who provides what and how does it potentially meet clear intelligence needs of an intelligence seeking organization. Following we offer some tools and hints for vendor evaluation.

Whenever business intelligence is required many companies start to scour the web or contact known market & competitive intelligence vendors. A more efficient way of picking what is needed would be a well maintained vendor database or overview of intelligence offers and services.

 

Organizations who went through this exercise to straighten out there intelligence procurement process and do in fact maintain such a database claim, that they speeded up their intelligence gathering process (and all other following processes therefore) significantly.

Individual reviews of vendors could be conducted with intelligence users internally. The following form or questionnaire could be helpful to collect valuable feedback:

Intelligence-Provider-Evaluation-Questionnaire
(Microsoft Word Document File Size: 138kb)

 

The entire collection of such forms could be compiled in a database or spread sheet, so anyone in need of business intelligence would always have immediate access to vendor information.

Based on the intelligence procurement strategy it would be much easier to prevent business units from purchasing not approved intelligence or use improper channels.