21 juin 2008
The analyst as a manager of the collection strategy
The collection plan is a key document indexing the intelligence requirements expressed by the decision makers. Theoretically it seems quite simple to express information needs but in fact, it appears difficult for the trainees to express clearly and in a relevant way, the requirements in strategic information related to a CI project.
It seems that this difficulty is related to two overlapping factors: a bad appropriation/control/intelligence of the project or problem to be solved, then a feeling of illegitimacy which inhibits the transmission of directives.
A solution consists in using what we call in French “infomediaire” (“information intermediary”) in the person of the analyst. As an information manager, he has to connect two universes: the informational team and the decision makers. Thus the analyst is as well a translator, as an interpreter, as a knowledge mediator.
What is consequently the analyst’s task?
First, to ask the preliminary good questions to the decision makers:
- Tell me about your strategic views? What’s your project? What are the objectives? Tell me about the context? What’s the problem? What do you want exactly?
- What are the stages of the project? Tell me about the constraints, the key success factor form your point of view?
- What is the state of our knowledge on the subject?
- Can you define our assets, weaknesses, vulnerabilities?
This first interrogation aims to understand the DM’s strategic vision in order to identify the different stakes.
However, the analyst keeps in mind, regarding the complexity theory, that asking questions does not simplify situations, quite to the contrary. Thus he has to prepare himself to face complexity because questioning may be a factor of anxiousness from which he must preserve the DM.
Second, to ask the questions directly related to the objectives of the organization. For example, to put the question “what are future key technologies of the Internet?” is different than “How to position our company compared to future key technologies of the Internet?”The second question implies a dynamics related to the organization whereas the first question remains a simple subject of curiosity which involves a second question: so what?
This brings a corollary remark: when the watching team or the intelligence services are not implied upstream a decision making process, their production comes to be grafted with more or less relevance on cognitive diagrams formed by a mixture of intuitions and collective intelligence of the decision makers, which are difficult to make evolve.
How to identify the requirements in information?
They can be obtained from various methods:
- Strategic analysis matrices can be used as guidelines (SWOT, PESTEL...)
- elicitation which consists in interviewing managers and experts in order to identify explicit and implicit needs
- brainstorming to make emerge needs or ideas within a group
- immersion in the available data from which a need can emerge (following the concept of serendipity)
These methods make it possible the analyst to collect the questioning, to formalize the strategic issues, and to work out priorities according to the importance and the urgency of the needs. It is consequently possible to organize the collection (teams, structures, means, directives, limits), and to prepare the evaluation of the production compared with the objectives, in order to measure the effectiveness of it.
The collection plan, worked out by the analyst as an organizer-mediator, does not appear any more as an abstraction from the watchers point of view. In return, the production is not any more the mirror of painful and crippling informational vacuity of the decision maker.
