I’m just back from a holiday in Barcelona, Cadaqués and Southern France, mostly the hill town of Itzac where family lives. As often happens I had time to reflect on recent happenings in my life.
I feel like one of my rocks, SCIP has shifted in my absence due to the merger with Frost & Sullivan’s Institute. I have been an active member since 1990, participating in most annual conferences, served on its board, helped found the Minnesota chapter. I am a columnist for CI Magazine and have given presentations at most SCIP conferences since the mid-1990s. So you get the drift: I am committed to the CI profession and to SCIP.
How did we get there? I think the reasons are deeper than our weak economy, although it is a contributor. Competitive intelligence is not recognized enough to keep SCIP afloat on its own. Corporate members increasingly conduct competitive intelligence as a part of their job, but many are not full time practitioners. This is also true for many consultants and academics who teach competitive intelligence, often as part of an MBA or other Master’s program.
Many companies include competitive intelligence as part of other business functions which are well defined: product planning, strategic planning, marketing, PR, sales, R&D, but CI really isn’t perceived as a discipline in many companies.
When SCIP was formed in 1986, it was the only game in town, but now there are competitive intelligence divisions and / or CI programs within other organizations such as SLA (Special Libraries Association), AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals), American Marketing Association, and Marketing Research Association to name a few. SCIP has perceived these groups as competitors and has felt more threatened by them rather than acting cooperatively and partnering and learning from them. SLA has implemented a competitive intelligence certificate program within its CI Division, which has been very successful, while SCIP is still working on a certification program. SCIP also competes with social networks where participants act and react quickly to events like the CI Ning, LinkedIn groups and Twitter for written communication on competitive intelligence.
For SCIP to survive, even with Frost’s infusion of cash, it’s imperative that SCIP turn on its marketing machine with urgency and reach out to companies and individuals and educate them on the compelling value of conducting systematic CI. Many don’t get this and just do CI on an ad hoc basis, when they feel pain. I know this since I’ve been consulting for a while and mostly get called in when companies are having trouble.
CI needs more recognition in the academic world. I am not a professor, but I know that what people learn in school, they often use at work. If CI is strongly marketed to schools as part of the curriculum in undergraduate and graduate business programs, this will help the profession and SCIP both. A scholarly journal would be another step in credibility for the academic community.
I came home and spent hours pouring over the posts that had been added on the CI Ning particularly two of them:
Interest in Starting an Online-Only CI Academic Journal?
I hope that SCIP’s leadership is reading the CI Ning. There are so many good ideas posted, so SCIP has a great opportunity to listen and query these individuals more closely and engage them to be part of the solution.
Filed under: AIIP, communication, Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, leadership, LinkedIn, SCIP, social networks, Twitter | 6 Comments »
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