The Intelligence Cycle is a process that controls the scope and pace of the overall production of competitive intelligence. It consists of five steps: planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis and production, and dissemination and feedback. This is an iterative and interactive process.
Planning & Direction:This initial stage is critical to the success of any competitive intelligence program and its adoption by the decision-making authority. It is important to involve all the key stakeholders at this stage to define project objectives. Once clearly defined requirements are obtained, the intelligence team can effectively execute the plan by leveraging what they already know about the issue and what they need to find out from available resources.
Collection: The objectives defined in the planning stage guide this step of the intelligence cycle. The collection phase determines where and how to conduct data acquisition and information gathering. There are a wide-array of open and closed tools and sources for retrieving the data and information such as Internet research, annual reports, underground forums, social media, news media, blogs, patent databases, internal and external relationships.
Processing: The processing step involves the collation, validation, and evaluation of the collected data and information to confirm its usefulness and relevance, a precursor to analysis. The timeliness and accuracy of the processing depends on the type of collected data or information and type of processing and exploitation system available. For instance, the processing requirements for data conversion and correlation are different for scraped websites than they would be for social media chatter before they can be intelligible to the human analyst.
By filtering out the “noise” and converting raw data, intelligence professionals can focus on evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting the data and information to produce a finished intelligence product.
Analysis & Production: This is the phase where the intelligence analyst’s shine by transforming the processed data and information into a fused, complete competitive intelligence information. Through evaluation, analysis, and interpretation, the analyst produces the finished intelligence that is contextualized, in an easily digestible format that answers the requirements and facilitates the decision-making process.
The key components of this phase are relevance, accuracy, and completeness in satisfying the original requirement or else you could fall into the threat intelligence trap where the deliverable is interesting but not compelling enough to act.
Dissemination & Feedback: In this final step, the intelligence team employs what is called the four “rights” rule: delivered in the “right” format, placed in the “right” hands, given at the “right” time, and provided through the “right” medium. These elements are important because the product is only valuable if it is delivered in a timely fashion in an appropriate medium and meets - preferably exceeds - the original requirements.
Though it is a continuous process, as a closed loop system, the intelligence cycle ends when the originator of the request provides feedback as to the value of the product. The learnings from the previous cycle adjusts the next competitive intelligence cycle.