Question

Why is corporate intelligence important to business? When does it become unethical?

Answer 1

Corporate intelligence:

In an increasingly regulated envirinment , it is important for the corporates to be proactive in protecting their brand and reputation.It is important for them to be assured about the intergrity of their clients,business partners and employees including their consistency, behaviours and validity of the information they provide. Corporate intelligence is about gathering and analysis of the information to outline facts that help organisations to make considerate and informed management decisions.It is also called as "Competitive intelligence".

Competitive/Corporate intelligence is the activity of monitoring the environment external to the firm for information that is relevant for the decision making process of the company.

Objective:

The objective of corporate intelligence is not to steal a competitor's trade secrets or other proprietory property but rather to gather in a systematic and overt manner a wide range of information that when collated and analysed provides a fuller understanding of a competitor's structure, culture, behaviours, capabilities and weaknesses.

Importance of CI to business:

CI is a tool to alert the management to early warning of both threats and opportunities.

It is highly specific as it provides timely information about a corporation.

It is a way for companies to improve their bottom line.

It is simply marketing research in disguise.

In other words,we can say that Competitive intelligence is important to business because without it, the companies are left to make aimless strategic decsions , or worse yet, tryvto find the information regarding its business environment and competitors on its own.

CI is the process of ethically collecting ,analysing and discriminating accurate, relevant,specific,timely and foresighted and actionable intelligence regarding the implications of the business environment,competitiors and organisation itself.

When does corporate intelligence becomes unethical?

It is very important to collect the data in an ethical and legal manner by the companies.A corporation can break the ethical and legal code by collecting corporate intelligence in the following ways:

1.If a company tries to gain the competitively sensitive material about other company which has taken active measures to protect it by intentionally breaching those measures and smuggling the information due to which such company can be at loss financially.This will be considered illegal.

But there are many other ways where no illegal charges are made but are purely consideral unethical.

2.Lying in general

3.Pretending to be a customer trying to purchase something and looking into the information of company.

4.Posing as a job seeker at informational interviews

5.Claiming to be from a company other than the one you work at.