How and why Strategic Intelligence?

Strategic intelligence is a technique for collecting and analyzing information that drives economic decision-making. Many companies today rely on this tool to sustain their activities, stand out from the competition, and update their strategic planning. It follows a systematic and structured process that determines its effectiveness. ACM Canada explains how and why this system should be implemented within an organization.

What is Strategic Intelligence?

Strategic intelligence is part of modern companies’ management policies and involves collecting, analyzing, and disseminating relevant data from various sources. This proactive practice follows a rigorous methodology that optimizes information selection, interpretation, and contextualization.

This policy gives managers and stakeholders a comprehensive and informed view of their work environment. It informs them about:

• Market evolution,
• Competitor actions,
• Technological trends,
• Customer needs.

Companies can then use these elements to identify opportunities and risks related to their sector, regardless of size.

Different Types of Strategic Intelligence

Different forms of strategic intelligence are tailored to each company’s specific needs. Depending on its objectives, an organization can implement one or combine several of these approaches.

Technological Intelligence

Technological intelligence allows companies to stay informed about the latest digital advancements in their sector. It involves monitoring specialized platforms, scientific publications, patents, and the online behaviour of emerging players. This process facilitates the identification of innovations that could impact products, services, manufacturing processes, or business models.

Anticipating technological trends allows companies to make informed decisions in research and development, investment, and product design. Successful digital intelligence optimizes a company’s competitiveness and provides a good market positioning.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence is essential for understanding competitors’ strategies, movements, and offerings. Implementing this policy helps business leaders identify and track products and services similar to their brand. Marketing activities, partnerships, recruitments, and rivals’ financial performance are also considered. Analyzing competitive information effectively detects market threats and adjusts management strategy accordingly.

Regulatory Intelligence

Regulatory intelligence is how companies stay informed about legislative and legal changes that could affect their activities. This involves consulting laws, decrees, and standards in relevant jurisdictions.

This tool ensures that offerings comply with legal requirements, avoiding sanctions and counterfeits to protect the brand’s reputation. Regulatory intelligence can also reveal new business opportunities or competitive advantages to motivate decision-making.

Commercial Intelligence

A commercial intelligence policy is based on customer needs and business evolution. This helps evaluate a product or service’s relevance compared to competitors’ offerings and modify it if necessary. This approach optimizes customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Commercial intelligence is also helpful in analyzing the financial health of suppliers and subcontractors. It assesses the quality-price ratio of inputs to save on the supply chain. It is an effective system to increase an organization’s profits and strengthen its market competitiveness.

Why Implement Strategic Intelligence in a Company?

Strategic intelligence allows companies to move beyond short-term vision and projects into the future with informed management. It provides the company with information about:

• Its environment,
• Competitors,
• Key market players.

This analysis helps understand emerging trends, identify opportunities and threats, and anticipate market changes. This policy facilitates good decision-making to position well in a sector. It thus drives the development of products and services tailored to customer needs.

This intelligence system also allows companies to adapt to changes in the economic environment to optimize long-term success. A company that neglects its strategic intelligence risks being surprised by competitors, disruptive innovations, or changing consumer behaviours. These unforeseen events can have disastrous consequences for the organization’s competitiveness and sustainability.

Steps to Implement Strategic Intelligence

The success of an intelligence strategy depends on several factors, including the resources used (human, financial, and technological). Management consulting companies like ACM Canada provide personalized support in several steps.

Define Objectives and Identify Information Sources

The type of strategic intelligence to implement depends on the company’s stakes (understanding its environment, having a list of relevant competitors and customers, or targeting new growth opportunities). Therefore, it is necessary to define the brand’s objectives and identify the information sources to help achieve them. Sales reports, patents, and market studies of the company are internal resources to exploit for the project.

Intelligence professionals also use external sources, including websites, press articles, social networks, databases… Suppliers, consultants, and experts represent human resources that can be used to achieve objectives.

Choose the Right Strategic Intelligence Tools

Professional intelligence specialists use specialized tools to automate data search and collection. These applications are also practical for organizing and processing information. Choosing a free or paid solution depends on the company’s stakes and the budget allocated to the project.

For an SME, Google Alerts is a good software for receiving email alerts whenever new content is published online on a helpful topic. Feedly is also an interesting RSS feed aggregator. It helps track websites and blogs in one place. Mention is another intelligence tool suitable for small organizations. This solution facilitates consulting brand and competitor reviews on social networks.

For a large company, Digimind or Brandwatch‘s features are more appropriate. These complete platforms optimize information collection, text analysis, data visualization, and report creation. Synthesio is a good tool for studying customer sentiment.

In the context of an SME, simply monitoring the social networks of your main competitors or companies that inspire you is a good practice. Also, in a competitive market, some companies do not hesitate to use mystery shoppers to closely monitor their rivals’ practices and stay at the forefront of industry trends.

Collect, Process, and Exploit Data

Organizing information in a file system, database, or content management tool is helpful for easy retrieval. After that, it is necessary to analyze them by targeting trends and patterns. Visualizing data can also help better understand and communicate them to others.

There are various dissemination options, such as writing reports, presentations, infographics, or email alerts. The final step is to make strategic decisions based on the received information. This prerogative often belongs to department managers (sales, R&D, marketing, etc.) or project management teams.

Strategic Intelligence: Opt for Good Communication in the Company

Managers must be convinced of the importance of strategic intelligence to maximize its impact. The communication strategy should highlight its benefits to the company. An argument based on data and concrete examples can help raise awareness about its validity.

Employees are also a lever to stimulate innovation and strengthen the sense of belonging within a company. Therefore, they should be at the heart of information dissemination related to the system. Implementing training dedicated to intelligence can also allow employees to understand the stakes and familiarize themselves with available tools. It is a good idea to create discussion spaces where employees can develop their intelligence practices.