When it comes to early warning and monitoring of the competitive environment, organizations need to improve the quality of their analysis and better learn from the collected intelligence to recognize their “blind spots.”
While some organizations developed sophisticated and effective future preparedness systems, the Academy of Competitive Intelligence survey shows that the majority of businesses do not have a systematic process for dealing with risks to their long-term strategies (Ben Gilad, “Early Warning,” AMACOM, 2004.) It is clear that strategic “future Management is yet to take its rightful place among the established organizational management processes.
Companies often fail to establish the right relationships and balance between tactical market intelligence activities usually conducted by business units and Sales and Marketing organizations and the strategic intelligence work that focuses on ensuring the long-term competitive health of the enterprise.
Many organizations often have difficulties with involving people belonging to various parts of an organization in monitoring the environment and in motivating them to share collected information.
Recent survey of 2,625 users of competitive and market intelligence in Europe and North America by Global Intelligence Alliance (www.globalintelligence.com) demonstrated that linking Market Intelligence with decision-making is still a development area. The respondents did not feel very strongly about how well their Market Intelligence service supported them in business planning or in making well informed decisions. The results suggest that in many companies, the ROI of Market Intelligence could still be increased by strengthening the linkage between MI deliverables and the strategic planning process, sales and marketing, and product and innovation management.
Future Map is designed to structure and facilitate the intelligence process in the organization, making the process and its results visible and valuable to decision makers. Its goal is to ensure management buy-in for intelligence work and to directly connect the consumers and suppliers of intelligence in the organization. Our system drives and supports all aspects and stages of the intelligence process, integrating internal and external providers and giving everyone a real-time synthetic view of the evolving strategic position.