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the Free CMSWire Newsletter“Intelligence” is a word much bandied about in enterprises. Frankly few enterprises use it properly to denote what constitutes authentic intelligence.
"Intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalized black market in perishable commodities" Master spy novelist John LeCarré
While the above notion is intended to refer to information gathered by spies regarding enemies, this sort of thinking has colored how enterprises view intelligence: the secret information that will solve all problems and kill all enemies. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking business intelligence or market / competitive intelligence. The apparent allure of the military and spy industries for enterprises has badly skewed how many companies view intelligence.
The kind of intelligence that truly benefits enterprises derives from classic definitions of the word: learning, understanding, applying knowledge and experience to new situations to make better decisions. For both business intelligence and market/competitive intelligence, the frequent catchphrase is “making better business decisions”. Both involve data, analysis, recommendations. Both can have strategic and tactical applications. Both benefit from qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions. And both should strive for authentic INTELLIGENCE, not just resultant collections of information.
Business Intelligence methodologies and tech solutions have been used to generate actionable views of a company, frequently rooted in business operations. Until recently, BI outputs have been primarily reports — some might say too many non-contextual reports, many of which may be trivial, pointless, or worse, misleading. The BI world includes analytics, data mining, text mining and predictive analytics.
Editor's Note: See Business Intelligence Spending Grows, But Many Enterprises Unhappy with Vendors
And sometimes BI is considered to be ‘competitive intelligence’, hence my references to market intelligence. Market/competitive intelligence and business intelligence should be complementary, but are not the same thing. In my view, a certain amount of BI output contributes ‘intelligent data’ for market intelligence initiatives.
Overall, market intelligence gleans from many ‘data’ sources from many disparate sources inside and outside the firewall, both qualitative and quantitative, while filtered by specific strategic contexts. Until recently, BI has mostly derived from practices and technology that address structured data and business processes inside the firewall. BI will now have to include unstructured or content sources in analytics, to add in missing subtleties, context and insight that cannot be pulled from structured data sources.
Analytics Everywhere
In addition to overt BI-style analytics, many other analytics solutions have been proliferating to help make better business decisions. Web analytics were silo’d for a while as relevant only to website usages. But web analytics now have many forms and have become very sophisticated. Data captured by web analytics is now important to many teams across the enterprise and is now becoming more integrated into other “business intelligence” endeavors.
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