Definition

Competitive Business Intelligence, (CBI) is the process of gathering publicly accessible information on a target to satisfy a goal. The goals dictate if the investigation is a one time effort or ongoing. Closely related is Business Counterintelligence the process of identifying and securing confidential material from industrial espionage

Competitive Intelligence Goals

 The main goals for CBI are to identify the existing and new competitors and investigate elements of their current and future strategy.

• General Industry Trends Survey.
• Strategic Decision Support.
• Early Warning Systems.

To better service the decision makers a survey called Key Intelligence Topics (KIT) can be customized by the CBI expert. KIT is a tool to collect the precise  information needs and expectation. Additionally it can be used to determine the current information available to the users.

Strategic Information Classification

In the context of strategic intelligence, information is considered according to two dimensions.

Accessibility - The degree the information can be publicly retrieved.

Confidentiality - The degree that the information is  restricted through compartmentalization and secured by legal obligation to secrecy.

Materials published due to regulation or by choice are considered Common Knowledge. Most information in a organization is neither confidential nor publicly accessible this type of information is generally uninteresting. However confidential materials which should be secured by a counterintelligence strategy may be publicly accessible. Acquiring confidential materials represent a gray area bordering from the unethical to the  illegal.

Only a small fraction of existing information is generally classified and unavailable, and most questions posed by CBI can be reasonably answered by researching legitimate channels.