Internal Customers

The first, and most important, step is to establish who could be the "customers" for the CI, and what they would or should use the CI for. Experience shows that there is no point in spending resources to collect "complete" information on every target for everyone in the firm. When a unit does that, it is really running a newsletter, not a CI function.

The key here is to determine what CI will make a difference with which of the firm's, or strategic business unit's (SBU's) key decision makers. What a new CI unit does not want is to receive a mission, or even an assignment which says, in essence, "We want to know everything about this target (or targets)." Frankly, given the easy availability of raw data, sometimes in vast quantities, your end users do not want this because they would then spend all their time digesting the data that the CI unit could generate, without ever having the time to act on that small portion of it that is actionable. All this means that, as a part of this effort, one must get to the real decision makers at a firm, the ones we call the end users.