Social networks and competitive intelligence

There is a virtual consensus among competitive intelligence experts about the need to widely spread the responsibility for gathering information and finding significant patterns. Competitive intelligence in an organization is viewed as a responsibility and an opportunity for managers, salespeople, engineers, technicians and so on. In fact one of the most common activities taken on by competitive or business intelligence areas is training various groups of employees on skills and attitudes that help to advance the organization's intelligence.
The adoption of a social network perspective has potential for greatly enhancing these efforts. Information and meaning flow through networks of relationships. Robust and healthy internal networks can speed up and improve the gathering of information and meaning. Moreover, they are a prerequisite for the effective use of the collected intelligence. Information, data and analysis stored in databases or spread through presentations and reports tend to have a weaker impact in comparison to those flowing through networks of trusting relationships.
On the external front, building networks is vital for the collection of information that is neither public nor available from secondary sources. These flows of information are essential to sensing and identifying weak signals of change.
Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that building internal and external social networks that are healthy and carefully woven should be among the top priorities for managers in charge of business and competitive intelligence.