Understanding Key Intelligence Needs (KINs)

Abstract

This chapter explains how to translate an organization’s strategic aims into key intelligence needs (KINs) and how to prioritize and categorize the needs. It argues that an essential aspect for any competitive intelligence (CI) professional is to gain the confidence of management to determine what information about the environment should be collected in order to produce intelligence. Furthermore the author hope that understanding how to determine a set of KINs as derived from an organization’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives and how to break down KINs into general and specific KINs will assist CI professionals to understand what their internal customers want to know about, need to know about and should know about and why, when they need to know it, and who needs to know it by identifying KINs. The application of KINs in a practical situation is illustrated in a case study of a South African company in the furniture industry.