Pre-adoption diagnosis of the intelligence process in organizations: A Delphi study with intelligence practitioners

Abstract

In turbulent and competitive scenarios, strategic intelligence is a crucial process for organizations to reduce uncertainties during decision-making and to anticipate changes that may affect their performance and sustainability. Despite the relevance of the activity, continuous and structured processes based on intelligence in organizations are not a reality due to the difficulty of implementing and formalizing it. Executing a diagnosis to evaluate conditions that precede the adoption of a structured intelligence activity allows companies to recognize their efficiency to perform monitoring, to further improve or implement it. This paper explores organizational, informational, individual, technological and material conditions that precede the adoption of the intelligence process, reviews six diagnostic models and proposes a diagnostic tool to evaluate issues that must be considered in advance. The Delphi method was used to exploit opinions among 30 intelligence practitioners in order to define which conditions of the process should be evaluated before its adoption in companies. As a result, this work contributes to filling the gap observed in the literature about the motivation to initiate the intelligence process in organizations and presents a formalized tool to evaluate its pre-adoption stage.