Keys and attributes of a technology monitoring and intelligence system.

There are four different main ideas to carry out properly a monitoring and intelligence practice within an organisation. Those correspond to a different area of the environment to be watched and monitored:

● Competitors: it deals with the direct and systematic observation of the current and potential competitors’ actions.

● Technology: focused on the scientific and technological environment.

● Regulatory oversight: it pays attention to the regulatory framework where the company or organisation is working.

● Trade monitoring: clients’ and providers’ data, as far as attitudes and next behavioural perspective in the market are concerned.

The observation has to be a particular combination of all four kinds since it will depend on the organisation strategy and the dynamic of the competitive environment. This is the reason for the recurrence to Porter’s strategic analysis model on the 5 competitive forces (potential competitors, providers, clients and substitution products).

The first step to working out a technology monitoring and competitive intelligence system in the organisation consist of the strategy deployment. To avoid losing the focus and struggle with risks associated to the Information overload "infoxication", it is essential to prioritise challenges and to undertake the implementation of the system by making further efforts on tasks that provide more value to the organisation from the strategic point of view. Thus, the strategy deployment process implies the identification of the key aspects that must be monitor:

1.Strategies

2. Challenges and subchallenges

3. Decisions

4. Key questions / Intelligence topics.

To put it into practice, the configuration of self-organising work teams to carry out the tasks is proposed.

Once the strategy is disaggregated in both challenges and subchallenges, the key questions are identified (those are the Key Intelligence Topics, KIT). Those are variable questions about outside and inside the organisation that change over the years meaning consequences for the organisation strategy. They should be related to information sources so to find suitable answers.

After refining it, the localised information is analysed for the debate and the construction of shared conclusions. At this moment the team can propose ideas based on the results obtained from the subchallenge analysis. Once added up and evaluated all the proposals made to the subchallenges we obtain a series of projects that reinforce the organisation strategy and that are compatible with the competitive environment. It is also possible that environmental analysis leads to proposals that correct the initial strategy.