aUTHORED BY dR. tOM gROOMS
"In-house Capabilities"
From a historical perspective, successful
business enterprises have been collecting and using intelligence in an
organization manner since the late fourteenth century, when the House of Fugger from its base in Augsburg, Germany made a fortune in
textiles and mining, and then became one of the Continent’s first international
banking houses, which launched its “manuscript newsletters” to provide key
officers with a steady flow of carefully selected political and commercial
information. Since then, just about every major business enterprise has
developed some form of intelligence-collecting activity.
Today most large companies have several
intelligence-type activities under way, including market research, economic
forecasting, political risk analysis, reverse engineering, business
intelligence, marketing intelligence, and market Intelligence. It is this
broadening of the concept of intelligence - from business intelligence of
stealing secrets, which is legitimate for a government to do under certain
circumstances but never for a private enterprise, to market intelligence of
timely information – that has freed business to leap forward in the use of
intelligence.
Now some of the large multinational companies
that do not have in-house capabilities regularly purchase intelligence analyses
from one or another of the intelligence-consulting firms that have established
credible reputations for confidentiality and quality of intelligence. Based in
the world’s political and financial capitals – Washington, Dallas, New York,
London, Paris, Zurich, and Tokyo – most of these firms are owned and operated
by former high-level government officials who, in effect, are repackaging and
selling to the aforementioned corporate clients, often for astoundingly huge
fees, the information and insights they acquired while in office. With the
support of topflight research teams, themselves consisting mainly of
lower-level ex-government officials, these firms provide intelligence to
corporate clients at a level, and on a range of subjects and issues, never
before available on the open market.
Thus, market intelligence as an in-house
operation to the CEO has specific advantages and higher levels of efficiencies
in the areas of knowledge management systems and direction. This is not to
suggest a lessening of the value received from the external sources, but to
point out what an external source cannot provide – CEO checks and balances
regarding organizational performance and enhanced value of the intelligence
application by the organization.
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information does not purport to be complete; therefore, consult with expert
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