Competitive Intelligence For Dummies

Chapter 5

Gathering Intelligence from Internal Resources

In This Chapter

Feeding internal information to the CI team

Synchronizing intelligence duties with different departments

Organizing and storing information to simplify retrieval

You’re probably sitting on a gold mine of information, and you may not even realize it. Every day, executives in your company soak up relevant information, salespeople and customer service reps talk to customers, IT engages in web analytics, and shipping and receiving personnel encounter problems that beg for solutions. You already have more information than you know what to do with, but unless you gather, organize, and analyze that information, it’s likely to go to waste, which is what happens in a huge majority of organizations.

In this chapter, I explain how to begin to mine the information you already have. I encourage you to engage in internal analytics and create a source map for each function of your organization so you have a clear idea of the nature of information that each function needs and can establish a steady flow of information between each function and CI. I also provide guidance on how to organize and store information to make it ...