Competitive Intelligence for Business Enhancement: Deployment Framework

Abstract

Many organisations employ Competitive Intelligence (CI) to enable and support their goals and objectives, periodically. The CI is deployed by many organisations mainly to collect and analyse relevant data for decision making and competitive advantage. CI products are deployed in various ways in different contexts. CI products differ in many ways such as in terms of compatibility and the functionalities that they offer. The functions of a CI product are considered to be of significant to the organisation that deploys it. Otherwise, it would be short of enabling and supporting its objectives. The compatibility is critical mainly because each environment is unique. Many organisations have acquired CI products which they could not use because of compatibility challenges they encountered during implementation. This is one of the reasons why the criteria for selection and deployment of CI products are very important in many organisations as explored and presented in this chapter.