The 12 Application Priorities for Competitive Intelligence in the Modern Business Enterprise

by Arik Johnson

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitor(s), wherever and whomever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms that you consider rivals and with whom you compete for market share. CI also involves determining what your rivals are planning to do before they do it. Strategically speaking, this is to gain foreknowledge of your competitors' plans and to plan your own business strategy to countervail theirs. As you might expect, this will involve many methods at the tactical collection level, but it will also require integration into your existing information infrastructure, analysis, and distribution of the information, and, finally, the calculation of business decisions on the grounds of that information and its analysis. This is the "intelligence" part of the formula.