What is Competitive Intelligence, really? As many Competitive Intelligence professionals will probably tell you, it depends mostly on your organization’s objectives. In this multi-blog series, we explore types and uses of competitive intelligence. We will draw on client experiences, who are leaders in industries ranging from security, banking, and manufacturing.
Risk monitoring or risk intelligence, although it varies by industry, can be defined as the anticipation and detection of all possible risks that could affect your organisation and the creation of contingency plans, response protocols and communication strategies.
Why it's essential to implement a rigorous risk intelligence strategy:
But what risks should you be looking out for? The following non-exhaustive list will give you an initial idea:
Although risk intelligence can be used for many purposes, it is important for organisations to put a rigorous methodology in place to control or at least detect and anticipate risks.
Risk assessment and prioritisation of risks
When you are monitoring for the purposes of risk intelligence, your monitoring/search parameters will be both considerably broader and incredibly specific. Competitive intelligence for risk is different from other applications of competitive intelligence.
If you are monitoring for the purpose of risk management, you would need to watch for:
* Note that it is extremely difficult to anticipate a cyber attack on you, but you can try to protect yourself by listing the most recent types of viruses or cyber attacks and setting up a response plan, organising simulations and stress tests.
This list may seem scary at first: how can you monitor all this information? What if you are a global manufacturing company with factories and suppliers all over the world? How do you monitor all these issues in all the countries you operate in?
As mentioned earlier, risk mapping is a way of visually representing risks in terms of likelihood of occurrence.
When conducting a risk intelligence project, it is highly recommended that you use data visualization tools to help keep track of all of your information. If you can link your monitoring tool to data visualization tools, you can establish a virtual risk management map, or a sort of risk management “war room” to see when a section of the globe you monitor is receiving a lot of attention from social media or the news. Imagine if you had all of your information automatically imported into a data visualization map. If you see that the city that your factory is located in is suddenly lighting up, you could check the associated mentions to identify what risk is occurring, and immediately deploy your risk mitigation plans.
It is highly recommended that you set aside a significant amount of time before setting up your project to list all possible risks and determine responses to all of these events.
Senior management and key stakeholders should be heavily involved in this process, as well as several key departments (for example, your public relations department should establish response scenarios to an industrial accident, a breach of a new regulation or a reputational issue in advance).
For deliverables, immediate news alerts are probably the most effective. If you see a theoretical risk is about to become a real risk, you won't have time to wait a week and create a newsletter. Employees, management, and key stakeholders will need to know about it immediately . Set up alerts for every hour or for special keywords, and ensure key players receive these alerts so they can act quickly.
Take the example of an entertainment company located in the outskirts of a city with millions of visitors per year.
Now let's look at the risks that the company would monitor:
Should you monitor the invisible web as part of your risk intelligence strategy? Is it worth it? Before answering this question, let's look at the definition of the invisible web. Did you know that the invisible web represents 96% of the entire web, while the publicly accessible web represents only 4% of the content? Imagine the amount of information available! The deep web is all the content that is not indexed by search engines (e.g. Google, Bing). It is very difficult to access without knowing the precise address. The deep web holds a certain amount of information:
"Deep Web" simply refers to areas of the Internet that are not indexed by search engines like Google and Bing. It is very difficult to access it without knowing the exact URL. The deep web hosts a certain amount of information including:
In contrast, the Dark Web refers to a subcomponent of the Deep Web. Accessing it requires the use of specific encrypted browsers — such as Tor or I2P — that conceal the identity and location of the user. Different sites that can be found include drug trafficking, firearms, organs transfer, private communications, child pornography, purchase of malware, etc.
Not all risk intelligence professionals will find it useful to monitor the invisible web. This realm brings interesting perspectives for organizations wishing to monitor the following topics:
The more an organization adopts an anticipatory posture, by combining a precise and perfectly up-to-date knowledge base of its environment and its vulnerabilities, the more it will be able to protect itself against risks and build appropriate response protocols.