April 2002

No. 004

"The Balance of Intelligence for the Organization"

Businesses and governments have been quick to understand the changed nature of intelligence by shifting the action from the operational side to the analytic side of the spectrum in the near past. In the last year, intelligence budgets have been rising accordingly with a house shift toward the operational since 11 September 2001 seeking more balance in the scheme of things to meet need requirements.

The most valuable information in any organization is the strategic plan. As with strategic business plans, intelligence budgets are always a closely guarded secret. But it is not a secret of the growing importance of roles of market intelligence and its rising budgets in support of the strategic interests of the organization. Most of the extra money is being used to beef up and expand these services’ analytic and operational capabilities to support and protect senior executives.

The growing vulnerability to senior executives is real and heightens the threat, internal and external, to the organizational being. The current threats are focused and perceived such that the operational expansion has precedence. You need only look to the upper echelons of strategic decision-making to see that senior executives are increasingly basing their major decisions and initiatives on intelligence estimates and other analytic products from their market intelligence team. This appears to be true throughout the world.

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