In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, making informed strategic decisions has become more complex. As both public and private enterprises navigate an array of challenges, key decision-makers demand deeper insights and operational clarity to guide their choices. These decision makers in public and private enterprises, irrespective of their nature and scale of operations, have increasingly demanded more clarity before making critical strategic decisions.

The Need to Look Beyond Management Information Systems (MIS)

Traditionally, MIS are used to collate data required by key decision-makers and assist them in making strategic decisions. This is internal data, and insights obtained from analysis of such data do not take into consideration external factors. Therefore, there are situations in which MIS is not enough to provide the clarity required to make sound strategic decisions, make or modify organizational policies, or evaluate potential investment or future growth opportunities. In such situations, decision makers are increasingly turning to strategic intelligence to provide the required visibility and context which can help them make more confident decisions.

What is Strategic Intelligence?

Strategic intelligence (STRATINT) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating qualitative and nuanced information that is relevant to the strategic planning and decision-making process of an organization. It arms key decision makers in an organization with intelligence to make important decisions pertaining to the organization’s long-term strategy or modify its key policies to ensure sustainable growth. STRATINT helps organizations better understand their internal and external environments, identify opportunities and threats, and make informed decisions that support achievement of their goals.

Gathering Strategic Intelligence

STRATINT can be gathered from the following four sources.

• Review of Internal Records

A good starting point for gathering STRATINT is to review and analyze the organization’s internal data. This can help identify the organization’s strengths and weaknesses as well as identify areas of potential risks or vulnerabilities for the organization.

• Public Record Research

Conducting research of information in the public domain can help develop an understanding of the ecosystem in which the organization operates and identify key internal and external stakeholders in it. This research can include review of corporate records and financial statements filed with the registrar of companies, media articles and regulatory databases.

• Review of Social Media, Professional Networking Platforms and Internet Directories

Social media platforms, specialist social media analytics tools, and various online forums can also be covered as part of the public record research. Researching internet directories and professional networking websites can also provide valuable insights.

• Human Intelligence

Primary data can be obtained by deploying human sources to conduct targeted market surveys or interviews of sources close to key stakeholders, including relevant industry experts. In gathering human intelligence, it is important to distinguish between sources who may have information through their interaction with other sources, and those human sources who have direct access to information that is being sought from them. While seniority of a human source (in terms of position, designation/role and/or the tenure) is important, how close the source is to the issue for which primary data is being obtained, must also be critically assessed.

What Are the Key Benefits of Strategic Intelligence?

Long-term Strategy Formulation and Policy Making

STRATINT can help address critical questions of the senior management personnel, the answers to which can help them formulate long-term plans and strategies. The decisions and strategies that the senior management personnel make with the help of STRATINT may cover a gamut of issues such as:

• Go-to-market strategies
• Product design and development
• Financial, operational and human resources allocation
• Designing marketing campaigns
• Mitigating anti-competitive threats

Risk Mitigation

Through STRATINT, organizations can promptly identify potential risks such as changing competitive landscapes, shifts in the regulatory environment, and threats to an organization’s assets (physical assets as well as intellectual property). Timely identification can lead to timely intervention to mitigate such risks. An effective STRATINT program can also help organizations identify and take advantage of growth opportunities, leading to improved profitability.

How A&M Can Help

Decisions around designing and developing strategic initiatives, introducing new policies, building a risk framework, and making strategic investment decisions require deployment of significant organizational resources, including financial and human resources. STRATINT can provide the visibility required by senior management personnel to make these decisions with confidence.

Through STRATINT, A&M has:

• Helped corporations identify and plug pilferage of fuel and minerals amounting to thousands of dollars each year.
• Assisted with identification of inefficiencies in procurement and helped develop strategies to eliminate such inefficiencies leading to cost optimization of approximately two percent.
• Identified anti-competitive activities and helped prepare legal, commercial and administrative strategies to counter them.
• Helped companies understand external factors, such as the presence of counterfeit or contraband products, persons with vested interests in tarnishing the reputation of an organization that was creating constraints on sales growth or operations and have helped deploy countermeasures.

By leveraging STRATINT, A&M can help organizations mitigate threats to their physical assets and personnel.