Intelligence 2.0 Minneapolis - Rethinking Intelligence in Business for the Next Generation of Management Decision Making

Beginning in Minneapolis on Thursday 8 November 2007, Aurora WDC will begin sponsoring a traveling series of one-day symposia called, "Intelligence 2.0 - Rethinking Intelligence in Business".

Envisioned as much a "conversation" as a collection of thought leadership presentations, like any good conversation, each will come and go with a unique dialog on the issues surrounding the practice of intelligence in the modern business enterprise.

So, if you can't make it to Minneapolis, we're planning four (4) more in 2008 for you to choose from and have high hopes for a vibrant online discussion to compliment and guide the live events.

There will be more news to come in the days and weeks ahead, but for now, please read on below for a better idea of what we've got in mind.

Understanding change in business has always been more art than science.

But today decision makers from top management on down are finding that they must think ahead to anticipate change while there's still time to take advantage of opportunities and navigate risks that have an impact on their company's ability to compete, grow and even survive in terms of relevance to the markets they serve.

Seeing clearly the risks and rewards ahead requires a new level of intelligence; intelligence about the fleeting attractiveness of markets, about competitive forces aligned against them and about the operations of the business itself that must flow together as coin of the realm in decision making, as much for the peripheral managers of a company's mission from the bottom up as for the management executives of a firm's operational synergy from the top down.

Unfortunately, this is an intelligence of a different sort than most enterprises have grown accustomed to. The kind of intelligence not only possible today, but critical for every company to break through the barriers to sustainable growth confronting them as they deliver products and services that customers might not have known they even needed.

Agenda & Scheduled Topics

Following a continental breakfast, we've assembled three of the most important thought leaders in the field of intelligence in business today to fill our morning with new perspective on some persistent ideas:

• Jay Kurtz on "Market & Competitive Mapping to Generate Intelligence from Information"
  
  
• Tim Powell on "Value@Risk: a Portfolio Approach to Intelligence Tasking"
  
  
• Craig Fleisher on "Analysis 2.0: The Bridge to Future Success Won't be Built on Conventional Thinking"

Following a catered lunch designed around networking and discussion of the morning's topics, as well as, allowing time for participants to catch up with the office, the afternoon will examine techniques we have observed for "surfing" an organization's intelligence flow internally and externally:

• Derek Johnson on "Field & Human Intelligence: Inside, Outside and Peripheral Sources"
  
  
• Arik Johnson on "Intelligence 2.0 - See Clearly, Think Ahead, Break Through"
  
  
• Practitioner Panel Discussion & Participant Forum on "The Road Ahead: Next Generation Intelligence Methods, Priorities & Techniques"
  

Finally we'll close with a cocktail party, featuring hors d'oeuvre and open bar with beer, wine and soft drinks, available for as long as the discussion continues. But this is just the start; future events will build on what we've learned from this first event and even incorporate the input of those who could not physically be there to join us.

The Symposium Format

A "Symposium-Style" event is designed to position a central thesis - in this case, the question of whether intelligence in business has fundamentally changed, if so then how and what do we do about it - throw in a few courageous expert facilitators and then encourage strong audience participation in a vigorous discussion of the issues surrounding the topic.

In pursuit of rich interaction and sharing of ideas, we have also tried to keep the barriers to entry (e.g., the fee) as low as possible to maximize participation from the local community as well as encourage practitioners outside the local community to travel in for the day.

More importantly for future events since this is a first-of-its-kind, we want the experience to be both flexible yet intellectually challenging enough to engage fully the imaginations of those, perhaps, most curious among us: intelligence people and the clients they serve in some of the world's most respected companies.

Alongside an agenda that also allows for the flexibility business people require to step away and check email, return messages and stay on top of things at their company, the Library offers Wi-Fi access for those with laptops.

As for the cost, it's not the sort of conference fee that will exclude participants from taking part in person, but it does help to cover the costs of the venue, meals and refreshments, logistics and other costs. The fee is $495 per person with select invited guests offered a $100 discount, and more for groups from the same company, please register now or call us with any questions or to register over the phone at 888-691-8132 by Wednesday 24 October.

About the Venue - the Minneapolis Central Library

Completed in 2006, the stunning Minneapolis Central Library is located in downtown Minneapolis between Hennepin Avenue, the city's arts and theater district, and Nicollet Mall, the backbone of the city's business and shopping districts.

Designed by world-renowned architect Cesar Pelli, the new 353,000-square-foot building features an eye-catching canopy roof that projects over the Hennepin and Nicollet entrances; a combination of transparent and translucent glass with seasonal Minnesota imagery such as water, snow, trees and prairie grass; an 18,560-square-foot "green" roof planted with low-growing, sun- and drought-resistant ground cover; and 140,000 square feet of underground parking.

Our main event will take place on the second floor of the Central Library in the Pohlad Hall Auditorium and the Thursday night reception will be held on the 2nd floor skyway.

While the Minneapolis event has a maximum capacity of about 200 registrants, we hope to have at least 50 participants in order to make this a sustainable prototype for taking this forum "on the road" to other cities around the country and, perhaps, the world as this rethinking of what intelligence is all about continues.

I've assembled a few thoughts of my own about what topics of discussion to expect that I hope to compel both expert and novice alike to join us in person, or if they cannot join us live, at least join us online, as we experiment together in changing the dialog we're all so engaged with one another in exploring.

Vision, Mission & Values - Rethinking Intelligence for the Next Generation

The vision for the Intelligence 2.0 meetings is that they can become frequent, multi-local conversations open to a more diverse community of interests exploring the next generation of the intelligence discipline as it applies to the world of business decision making. As a spirit of "open source" rules the atmosphere, all are welcome, from the broader intelligence community as well as from in and around the metro area we're hosting it in.

The mission of the meeting is to enable both intelligence practitioners and their customers alike to elevate the value of their work while also making that work more effective and efficient as the risks and rewards an enterprise faces today and tomorrow are quite different from those that confronted its forebears.

More importantly, we hope to open up the intelligence domain to all thoughtful business people in the local community, so we can help to spread the word that intelligence in business is a critical domain of understanding for the years ahead.

Historical Perspective, Future Trends and Central Theses

Over the past 25 years with the rise of globalization - in particular, post-WWII Japan, the so-called "Asian Tigers" and now Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) - the origin of intelligence in business parallels the privatization of intelligence at the national security level both in terms of personnel leaving the Intelligence Community for private sector work as well as more and more the U.S. "IC" making use of private contractors and their market-driven techniques to fulfill their decidedly non-traditional mission in an era where no single geopolitical rival exists.

This exchange of DNA and nomenclature has deeper roots in the oil-shock of the 1970's impact on American economic security and we've seen the mission of corporate practitioners in the field we know today as Competitive Intelligence evolve outward from a preoccupation with zero-sum competitors in the present tense to a broader, deeper concern with anything in the external environment that might have an impact on the company's competitiveness now or in the future.

In particular, the call has gone out from the most experienced among CI practitioners and advisors that we all need to "be more strategic" in our view of CI's mission and focus on the real value-added by that mission: analysis of the forces at work around the firm in the operating environment to guide management decision making.

Only by thinking in terms of supporting decisions in support of the company's chosen strategy while becoming management's eyes, ears and, by this admonition, brain as well, could CI practitioners in corporate roles ever hope to achieve sustainability and, by extension, could CI ever truly become a "profession" worthy of camaraderie.

That's a bit of a tall order, you say?

After all, what does management really do in large, global corporations other than make decisions and collect information to inform and instruct those decisions?

That's why they call the CIO the Chief Information Officer and why that office tends to report to the CEO these days instead of the traditional reporting relationship up through the CFO's office.

In terms of the current shift in thinking we've observed among CI practitioners, the compelling reason to update this top-management/decision-support focus has been driven by external trends in industry that are immutable and by and large beyond our control:

• Globalization: Now that manufacturing has come to its senses about transnational production, and with discussion of comparative advantage and wage arbitrage aside, the commodification of even the best-paying white-collar work, from investment analysis and intellectual property law to X-ray interpretation and pharmaceutical research, will happen in any occupation with repetitive, almost unconscious or instinctive, professional characteristics make the job "autonomic". Indeed, I would argue that, the only jobs "safe" from commodity-driven outsourcing will be those requiring the fully engaged attention-span of the producer and that only those employees with the "mind of the entrepreneur" will be valued by managers as indispensable.
  
  In this respect, attention and engagement have become the real differentiators among the workforce, as well as, the real reason behind the survival of any CI job, department or function whether in the U.S. or elsewhere. The double-edged epiphany that today every business is a global business, no matter how large or small, and that every employee is an entrepreneur, will leave most managers struggling to understand customer choice in an era where perhaps the most determinist of marketing's original "4Ps" - place - is no longer relevant when accessing goods and services that customers might desire.
  
  
• Innovation: Schumpeter's "black box" of the entrepreneur has been opened by scholars and practitioners who have cracked the code on how we might more predictably invent and market products and services that meet needs consumers never knew they had, even while understanding how to maximize the competitive barriers to competition (the legal ones, that is) and profits with it, to sustain growth in core business areas by outsourcing everything along the value-chain not considered performance-defining in the mind of the customer.
  
  This modularization by specialists stands in stark contrast to the vertically integrated model of scalable portfolio control so much more commonplace in the last century and driven by the need to "own" the factors of production. Most important in this understanding of how industries change is that it's no longer a choice between a low-cost strategy or a strategy driven by product differentation; sustainable strategy must be both at once. This new understanding is becoming so democratically dispersed it can do no less than become the lingua franca of management and those who support their decisions everywhere.
  
  
• Performance: The scientification of operational decision-making to align a company's assets for optimal productivity and return on those assets started with TQM as way to ensure consistency in production quality in the face of low-cost rivals attacking cash-cow products at the peak of their life cycle. This idea has spread in recent years to every corner of organizations as Six Sigma operating techniques have made it possible for any firm with the will to maximize its operational performance and productivity in current product areas to make financial returns in the near term the primary metric of success and basis for reward for managers and rank-and-file alike.
  
  More recently, Six Sigma champions have targeted that last bastion of irregularity - innovation itself - as the final target for error reduction available to cut costs and optimize asset leverage. If R&D and product development isn't producing a return equal to that of other assets, maybe we should modularize and outsource that too? But the current obsession with performance optimization techniques are really no different from those throughout the past 100 years in the sense that, they are directed at internally-defined, quantitative metrics for productivity alone, and experimentation for the sake of discovery becomes a decidedly more subjective, qualitatively messier and less predictable heresy among the cult of performance at any cost.

The tension that exists between the three universal trends above have meant that, even as CI practitioners strive to serve more diligently the interests of their organization in the strategy sense, forces beyond the control of management itself have made their task - ensuring full visibility, awareness and assessment of competitive, industry and market risk - an almost impossible task.

We are left with a temptation to assume it's far better to be lucky, than smart. Impossible as the task may seem, at least, without the help of everyone in the firm, the next two trends - Collaboration and Governance - have come in at either end of a continuum of tasking, sensing and interpretation to restore equilibrium to the intelligence system itself.

Intelligence as Part of Everyone's Job

The principle reason that we so often have a bureaucratic, top-down management apparatus is because there was no efficient way to control activities and assets and optimize the predictability of their performance, so in business, as in government, organizations would consolidate power at the top allowing someone else to make decisions for a large group of people as their "representative". But, technology erodes the need for command and control, by enabling more efficient and efficient channels of communication, breaking the tyranny of top-down enforcement and oversight.

This trend began with the "BPR" revolution of the early 1990's - "Business Process Reengineering" meant slashing the middle of the pyramid to "flatter the hierarchy" an organization used to manage itself. Unfortunately this also amounted to severing the spine - the central nervous system - of the organization as a new nervous system was installed to replace the old middle-management structure. "Groupware" and productivity software made it possible for every employee who survived the cost-cutting to be that much more productive in revenue terms than the team s/he replaced. Productivity soared during the 1990's as a result of this upheaval. And boards and their executive staff enjoyed a time of economic prosperity not seen since the 1950's that originally led to American economic hegemony later on.

As a consequence, companies today are more fluid, with a much more bottom up orientation. Products and services that involve a bottom up orientation are taking over and it's only a matter of time until the same thing happens to the management itself.

Genesis of the Intelligence 2.0 Idea

Since the dawn of commerce, competition and the drive to outwit, outmaneuver and outperform competitors in pursuit of sustainable and profitable growth and return on equity has been a required ingredient in the recipe for success in the free market world.

More recently, as alternate worldviews about the ultimate wisdom of centralized planning and investment for industrial and economic development have failed, the very idea of capitalism and business management have risen to become the single greatest forces at work shaping the world around us.

Governments no longer control us, companies do.

Over the past 25 years in parallel, the field of Competitive Intelligence, emerged out of the post-industrial rise of the Asian economies to challenge American economic hegemony in manufacturing during the 1980's and has today extended its presence to every industry, every market and every company's fundamental need to understand and anticipate change, not just from competitors, but from new threats as well as emerging opportunities in a constantly shifting operating environment.

So, borrowing heavily from the national intelligence apparatus in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, the techniques and nomenclature this new breed of business intelligence analysts used to structure their work was similar in many respects to that used to alert the nation to threats from the relatively few geopolitical rivals faced by the West, mostly from the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and the rest of the so-called "Communist bloc" countries.

That approach changed on September 11, 2001.

When the leadership of the nation's intelligence apparatus was caught by surprise in al-Qaeda's airborne attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was only a matter of time before the top-down oriented intelligence community began to leverage new tools, new techniques and even new ways of thinking.

They began to build models... to seek out patterns... to recognize risk in time to take action. And in the years since, we have avoided subsequent attacks on our nation, even as we have moved to countervail threats before they have a chance to have an impact.

At the same time, the term Business Intelligence came to become associated with the ways in which a company studies its own activities in order to optimize the return on its assets. Alongside it, Market Research practitioners, together an order of magnitude greater in number than those in CI, tried to become more strategic in understanding the markets in which the company was to operate.

Through it all, even as the nomenclature has become more confusing to those all of these groups serve, the value they produce in such silos have found it increasing difficult to reproduce with any regularity. This apparent lack of an ROI vector often leads firms to question whether they need any sort of intelligence apparatus at all, particularly during tough times, like those many believe we face in months and years to come.

Why "Intelligence 2.0"?

Depending on whom you ask, "intelligence" in a business context might mean a number of things. But no matter how large or small the enterprise, anyone faced with making day to day decisions on how to guide a firm to be profitable in producing value for customers, income for employees and returns for shareholders, while also planning ahead for which products and services future customers will be likely to buy from them given a choice between alternatives, intelligence is all about peak performance, maximizing competitiveness and producing innovation customers didn't even know they needed.

Likewise, it used to be that version 2.0 in software finally delivered the function that was originally promised for the product at the 1.0, though then you had to wait until at least 3.1 before it performed without crashing. Now that Web 2.0 is all the rage, it seems that "2.0" can be applied to just about anything. Customer Service 2.0... Marketing 2.0... Management 2.0... I've even seen Cooking 2.0 on the Food Network. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to see Intelligence 2.0 representative in our collective zeitgeist the sense that trends have collided that are about to change the nature of what intelligence in business is all about.

In fact, those forces are precisely what we'll be exploring in discussion as our morning experts give us a structure and a framework for understanding the key issues at stake in our deliberations.

Intelligence 2.0 isn't about throwing out the old, established ways of anticipating change; it's about creating equilibrium between these top-down, "decisive" techniques for tasking, sensing and interpreting change and pair them with bottom-up, "incisive" ideas for surfacing risks and rewards in time to act.

Other forces at work we hope to discuss include:

• The Rise of Web 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0
• The Pendulum Swing from Performance to Innovation
• The Changing Role of the CIO