Soft Knowledge as Standard Intelligence
As well as for external intelligence, soft knowledge residing in the heads of the employees regarding internal view of markets and customers, competitors and other business variables can be invaluable for the entire intelligence prospective.
Experienced employees are an incredible resource of soft intelligence as they have done something quite naturally for a long time that can not be provided by any intelligence portal or information depository: they have brought their knowledge into context with other business variables and made (in parts) a lot of sense of it all.
Moreover they would be great resources to make known about knowledge relations and networks: who-knows-what, what-to-do-if and so on.
Studies within the business intelligence community have suggested that intelligence tools and knowledge management systems dramatically gain acceptance and satisfaction, thus utilization if brought into relation of where and with whom to dig further and deeper into the topics at hand.
Moreover, executives have claimed that entire company philosophies and collaboration behaviors have changed significantly with similar functionalities. Cross-unit fertilization could thus be nurtured and further opportunities yielded.
