Commercial intelligence

Commercial Intelligence is the highest and most comprehensive form of legal, ethical open source intelligence as practiced by diverse international and localized businesses. Competitive intelligence focuses primarily on competitors and their capabilities within shared market spaces. Business intelligence is a mis-nomer for data mining and enterprise dashboards that present useful patterns or distillations of internal information to the executive.

Commercial Intelligence (CI) is the process of defining, gathering, analyzing and distribution accurate and relevant intelligence regarding the products, customers, competitors, business environment and the organization itself. This methodical program affects the organization’s tactics, decisions and operations.

A 1998 study by the Futures Group, a Glastonbury, Connecticut-based consulting firm indicates that 82% of companies with annual revenues exceeding $10 billion and 60% of those with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion now have an organized intelligence system. While most larger companies have specific departments devoted to Commercial Intelligence, mid-sized companies tend to hire Commercial Intelligence firms, and smaller business owners are more likely to do it themselves.

Commercial Intelligence can be obtained and analysed in various ways that include:

Primary sources of CI include:

Secondary sources of CI include:

Intelligence from both classifications can be found within the scope of open source intelligence (OSINT).

Efficient and successful CI is a constant cycle that consists of 5 steps:

Misrepresentation in CI is a form of cyber engineering. It is the act of falsely identifying yourself and bluffing people into giving you information they probably would not have had your true identity been provided. In fact, misrepresentation is the most common issue that subdivides numerous CI practitioners in many unclear ethical issues. The most common types of misrepresentation include:

All 3 misrepresentation issues share a common theme, which is: “What is the intent of the CI practitioner?”. Judging by a person’s intent, we can conclude whether or not the situation is ethical or non-ethical.

Client conflict means any situation in which a practitioner is faced with a conflict of interest between a former and current client. The practitioner must attempt to determine how to act in the best interests of several clients in the same or substantially related matter. This type of situation usually arises with CI practitioners who are consultants. However, a clear solution is obvious; the practitioners agree that they should never service competing clients at the same time in order to keep classified information secure. In addition, another conflict may arise in the CI consultant and client relationship. The client usually hires the consultant to gather as much information about their competitors. However, there is an ethical issue concerning the length in which a consultant would go in order to retrieve the required information; how much is too much? When the consultant ignores the cost at which they are seeking this information, they tend to stumble upon various ethical issues, and it is in fact these ethical issues which the clients don’t want to be associated with that push them to hiring a CI consultant.

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Wikipedia