Two New "Intelligence In Business" Blogs Of Note

Competitive Intelligence?  Too narrowly defined.  Strategic and Competitive Intelligence?  Too long.  Industrial Espionage?  Illegal.  Commercial Intelligence?  Better but easy to confuse with the other two "CIs". 

Whatever you tend to call it (and, as the title to this post indicates, I prefer "Intelligence In Business" or IIB), intelligence analysis as a function in the business world is growing very quickly.  More and more companies are waking up to the idea that internally focused operational efficiency is not enough --  they need to better understand the world of events, people and organizations that are relevant to their success or failure but are outside their control as well.

To paraphrase a well known military thinker:  "Know the competitor, the customer, the regulatory environment, your supply chain's vulnerabilities, the limits of your hiring pool, etc. and know yourself and you will succeed in all your battles."

That is a bit of a lengthy intro to two relatively new blogs that can help anyone new to the wild west of IIB understand it a bit better:

i-intelligence.  There are few people I know who are both as articulate and consistently right as Chris Pallaris.  His company, i-intelligence, is based in Switzerland but operates all over the world.  He and his team do not post often (so don't worry about getting overwhelmed by spam) but it always makes for interesting reading.  Of even more value, perhaps, is i-intelligence's twitter feed which can be (conveniently) found at @i-intelligence.  There Chris and his team cull and curate a stream of articles that should be interesting to anyone involved in intelligence.

MGT Analytics.  Whether it is making the theoretical real to the business person or just explaining the basics of intel, this new blog, run by Mike Thomas, looks like it is going to definitely be worth following.  I have known Mike since he was a student here at Mercyhurst and have always been impressed with the clarity of his insight.  More important than my intuitions, however, are Mike's wide range of real-world experience.  He has known both success and failure so there will be no pollyanna-ish leanings here.  Likewise, he has traveled extensively, taught accounting in China, gotten his masters, worked for the TSA, been a cyberthreat analyst and is now founding his second company.   Clearly worth a look.

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