Archive for September 2008

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

Intelligence points of pain (IPoPs)

I recently conducted a KVC Workshop for intelligence producers at SCIP08’s international convention in San Diego.  During the workshop I surveyed them about their biggest obstacles and problems in corporate intelligence.  We’ve been collecting and analyzing this kind of data now for several years—I call it the Intelligence Points of Pain (IPoP) database.

NEWS FLASH: Intelligence problems and challenges are remarkably similar across different organizations, in different industries, in different countries. Even as I compare Workshop results from different years, I find the results amazingly consistent.

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Sunday, September 14th, 2008

A call too late

It was a weekday afternoon in the fall of 2007.  Though sitting at my desk, I was speaking “virtually” with about a hundred other people around the world who share my interest in corporate intelligence.  Specifically, I was midway through giving a live webinar (hosted by Aurora) on the Knowledge Value Chain®.

A chat message came through on the screen sidebar from the head of intelligence at a large US company.  She said her company was planning an all-day intelligence event, and they wanted to order one hundred copies of my KVC Workbook as a discussion guide for attendees.  This was the largest single order for the book to that point, on that basis I counted the webinar as a huge success.  We left it that she’d call back the following week to firm up the order details.

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Sunday, September 14th, 2008

The four roles of intelligence

Here’s an excerpt from my chapter in the new book Starting a CI Function (SCIP 2008.)

In each organization, the specific mission for intelligence, and the intelligence plan that supports that mission, will vary.  However, a set of “information deficiencies” that is strikingly similar across many organizations, across all industries, remains.  These include:

  • There is too much information “out there”, and often it’s hard to find. According to the search engine Technorati, the number of blogs is now over 93 million-with 175,000 being added each day. Not all of these have business value—but a surprising number do, and should be on your intelligence “radar screen”. And it’s only going to get worse. A recent study (”How Much Information?  2003“, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley) found that worldwide information production increased by 30 percent each year between 1999 and 2002. Read the rest of this entry »

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