ABSTRACT
In today’s organizations, we o²en hear the adage, “Work smarter, not harder.” ™is is at the crux of this chapter in terms of applying strategic intelligence to help leaders make better decisions.
Strategic intelligence can be viewed as having three components (Liebowitz, 2006): business intelligence, competitive intelligence, and knowledge management. Business intelligence (BI) has an internal focus, competitive intelligence is more external, and knowledge management can be both internal and external, but is usually more internally directed. With business intelligence, the use of analytics (Davenport and Harris, 2007) and advanced information technologies is o²en applied to assist the decision maker. Competitive intelligence (CI) deals with establishing a program for collecting, analyzing, and managing external intelligence (such as competitors, environmental scans, etc.) to improve organizational decision-making. Knowledge management (KM), as we discussed in the last chapter, looks at leveraging knowledge both internally and externally, but typically has an inward focus on maximizing human capital and other intellectual assets in the organization. Together, the synergies among these three areas (BI, CI, and KM) can result in what the author calls “strategic intelligence” (SI).
