One, Two, or two in one?
Economic intelligence and strategic intelligence (a less known concept) are redundant, complementary or opposite? The truth is often in the middle. They inter-act in two separate universes with the company in the middle. This thinking process can be seen as a bow tie from S to E.
In an alchemical prism, negative energies (descending from heaven to earth) converge to the center, the business. They are then transformed into positive energies towards the world in order to radiate.
The S of Strategic, therefore, evokes "search", and the E of Economic tends to "exist".
Boomerang effect
Strategic intelligence (SI) appears after economic intelligence (EI). It focuses on the company in order to launch its actions towards its targets. It is always the result of a decision and are aware of possible consequences.
Like the history of arrow and shield, protection gets stronger and stronger as the attacks advance. Technology saves considerable time; however, it is now necessary to integrate the potential counter-attacks. So environmental scanning takes the lead on the offensive calculating. Gathering information becomes essential but without any strategy, it takes a prolonged period of time. The era of information retrieval was born.
Knowledge is power…
For a long time, the prerogative of militaries, the intelligence culture is now flourishing in the economic world and is guided towards storage of increasingly important data.
It, therefore, becomes essential to create a system to facilitate this quest and focus on its real needs. We had put the cart before the horse when talking about economic intelligence and ignoring strategic intelligence. The process is now complete and the business is centered. The information is all “upstream” as a source, and it is analyzed at “the center”. Afterwards it is expanded “downstream”. Everything is segmented into separate modules, themselves broken down into “watchers”. These are administered by designated teams, each specialized for their field of competency.
Multi-skills is multi-inefficient
A garage is made up of several divisions such as bodywork, mechanics, and more ... A preliminary audit on the vehicle detects faults and issues an opinion on the possible trips. Planning interventions according to the diagnosis is the first step.
Some of the work can be carried out on-site, and for technical or structural reasons, others are delegated to a specialized service provider.
This concept integrated with modules and their "watchers" will therefore, be deepened in our next article. The first business intelligence module dealing with “contextual” intelligence will be opened and developed. As we have seen above, we can deduce that this process simply teaches us to "search" how to "exist".