with Liam Fahey
Intelligence that makes a difference – that creates insights – is almost always the result of collaboration between intelligence professionals and decision executives. Neither one alone can create and leverage intelligence.
Intelligence that makes a difference – that creates insights – is almost always the result of collaboration between intelligence professionals and decision executives. Neither one alone can create and leverage intelligence.
Executives influence the direction of intelligence work. They shape the context for the work: they identify the current and emerging issues and decisions, questions they want addressed, areas and topics they would like explored, and, the nature of the dialogue they desire with the intelligence professionals.
Intelligence professionals create understanding and meaning out of disparate and always incomplete data, disconnected viewpoints and perspectives, and an ever-changing competitive environment.
When they work in tandem, they co-create an understanding of change and its business implications. This understanding influences what the organization thinks about (e.g. which emerging opportunities or risks need attention), how it thinks (e.g. identifying, challenging and refining core assumptions), the decisions it makes (e.g. what strategic moves to make, what business unites to support) and the actions it takes (e.g. where to allocate resources).
The Path to Success
Decision makers and intelligence professionals need to work together through facilitate working sessions or workshops to:
- Create Intelligence from the Decision-Maker’s Perspective: how to develop a framework that enables leaders to identify what intelligence is required, how they can contribute to creating that intelligence, how they can enable intelligence-related insights, how to use intelligence across a range of issues and decisions and how to work with and guide intelligence professionals.
- Link Intelligence and Strategy to develop and build tighter integration between strategy and intelligence: where to compete; how to compete, and the associated intent or goals.
- Link Intelligence and Operations, by mapping and assessing all facets of how intelligence currently relates to operations and how it might do so in the future.
- Assess Competitors. The ultimate intent is to create winning customer value propositions in the product marketplace and winning influence strategies in the stakeholder arenas.
- Develop an Effective Intelligence Process: intelligence needs, data requirements, specification of data sources, data collection, analysis processes, development of outputs, customization of “deliverables”, dissemination of outputs and integration of “intelligence” into decision making.
As Ben Franklin wrote, "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." The best way to do this is through projects focused on important decisions, for example:
- Strategic risk assessments
- Untapped sources of customer value
- Next generation of customers
- Emerging competitive threats
- Business Wargaming
- Competitor bid strategies
- Scenarios
- Targeted competitor assessments
Better decisions, faster
In summary, effective intelligence operations require co-creation of the necessary insights to make better decisions, faster. Those organizations that recognize the need for an intelligence “culture” rather than a “production system,” and actively take the necessary steps to jointly develop the necessary skills and capabilities of both decision-makers and intelligence personnel will consistently outwit, outperform and outmaneuver the competition.
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