The Future of Corporate Intelligence

Having being at the forefront of corporate intelligence, and Open Source Intelligence since leaving the highly classified world it has become a regular exercise of looking into the crystal ball and trying to predict the future trends. Currently both corporate intelligence and government intelligence has been receiving failing grades, and the billions wasted under President Bush on badly thought out intelligence concepts have not helped the perceptions of a waste of money.

It wasn't always so, for when corporate intelligence was a part of sales and marketing, and utilized the field sales and service force the results were impressive. In the government sector when OSINT was a part of the broadcast services , such as FBIS and the BBC it provided a valuable insight into the thinking of overseas markets and political thinking. Today we are exploring the fusion between OSINT, sales and social media to bring trends and actionable intellinge directly to the user in the field.

Intelligence Software

We have begun another comprehensive review of all the intel software packages available. As more and more companies, professional organizations and government agencies start their own Open Source or classified intelligence centers, and departments the choice of software becomes of vital importance.

The interface between the collectors, analysts and audience has to be carefully considered when choosing the right suite, or mix of programs. Remember just because the government, CIA or NSA uses the software does not make it a success. They fail more often than they succeed. That option just isn't there for commercial enterprises.

The total failures of the many companies in the Financial Sector should be a wake up call for everyone to examine their intelligence departments, and ask why they were not watching the marketplace. Collecting data for collections sake is no use to anyone, it just clogs up the system with noise.