Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is:

A legitimate area of study,

Taught in top Business Schools, and

The responsibility of all organizations.

My approach to competitive intelligence is slightly different than others. Most people approach CI as though it were a Marketing activity. While this is a valid approach, but I believe it disregards a lot of available intelligence. My approach, comes from a greyhat or blackhat hacker mentality, as that methodology facilitates more effective intelligence campaigns.

There are the characteristics of my Competitive Intelligence campaigns:

Remote access and central control

My harvesting activities are conducted through a time-proven platform that consists of many Harvesters that are controlled by a central server. The advantages to this system are many, including, distributed contact with the subject(s), single-point control of the harvesters (for scheduling, task queuing, and software updates), and a single place to gather and report on findings.

Stealthy behavior

There are many reasons why you want your intelligence campaigns to remain anonymous and stealthy. I can help explain why this is important and how to key your intelligence campaigns secret.

Automation

Automation is key to successful online competitive intelligence projects, because through automation, your competitive intelligence campaign:

Becomes cheaper

Facilitates periodic capture, and trend analysis

Actionable results

The results of your Competitive Intelligence campaigns should have the potential of changing what your organization is doing. Often, these changes can be impoemented automatically. Before you enter an Intelligence campaign, of any type, you should ask yourself how it may change your organization. If you can't answer that question, you probably shouldn't conduct that campaign.