As the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) 08 Conference gets ready to kick off this week, it has me thinking -- can we improve the ways corporate CI practitioners are trained? Finding the right CI training formula has been one of the most persistent challenges of the CI community for a long time. No one seems to have been able to come up with a consistent approach to training new practitioners, and further developing experienced ones. A good CI training program has to transfer and reinforce the skills necessary to excel at CI, and provide employers with well developed CI practitioners. To date, the profession's approach to training has been inconsistent to say the least, comprising a mix of one-off courses, informal networking, and other piecemeal approaches.
What can we do to fix this? Do business schools need to be more involved? Should SCIP become a certifying body for the CI profession? What are the essential skills all CI practitioners need to possess? We welcome your thoughts.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Problem With Competitive Intelligence Training
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1 comment:
William you're spot on here. I feel that there's a lot more CI training needs to cover, apart from the standard gathering and analysing of data into intelligence, namely:
- Communication skills
- The use of automation
There's a huge piece missing around how to communicate effectively within an orgainisation. How many times does good CI fall on deaf ears because of the way it's presented or the manner in which it's communicated to the people who can action upon the findings?
Regarding automation, many of us CI professionals operate as lone wolfs. The understanding of scale and how to automate the parts of the data collection process are poorly understood. In addition, automating parts of the CI process shows a willingness to position the data as just that, data - not insight. Insight is what we do with it afer that.
Really enjoying your blog by the way.
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