New vistas for intelligence

Society changes makes new demands on internal services and functions that can help various decision makers and others to not only make informed decisions but also coordinate the decisions and actions taken with the rest of the organization. In knowledge based companies this demand expands the managerial dimension of a firm to other people and processes, so that the knowledge developed and applied is informed and coordinated. These types of assignments are now given to intelligence services and intelligence personnel inside business organizations, with their tradition of monitoring and analysing the environment, and constitute new vistas for organized intelligence work (Hoppe, 2009). In this paper I use Burkes pentad to give an account of some important challenges encountered by intelligence personnel in modern business organizations due to the on-going industrial renewal and an increasing dependence on different knowledge processes. With the support from five different cases I claim that: The intelligence mission has changed from being a passive information service working on the command of high-ranking decision makers to an active internal agent for better business. Hierarchical position does not determine where intelligence is to be found. Instead the deployment of intelligence work comes from dispersed needs displayed in each unique subpart of an organization. Intelligence work moves away from the creation of intelligence artefacts to the creation of analytical conversations and the advocacy of distinct reference points in these conversations. Intelligence is personalized in two dimensions, firstly the analyst comes forth as an individual agent with a personal network, and secondly the intelligence produced is adapted to the individuals and the specific situation at hand