Shveta Sharma

VISION OF LEADERSHIP (www.Businessinnovationinsider.com)

A leader should welcome change, accept feedbacks from his colleagues, be a renaissance man/woman, add knowledge value (Gillette, p.10), develop an inspiring vision (Peters, 1998, p.483), manage by example ((Peters, 1998, p.497), innovate, and create a sense of urgency (Peters, 1998, p.569) towards achieving the goals set.

UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business Intelligence is the knowledge about the organization, its competitors and the environment within or outside the organization. Furthermore, with the progress in Information and Communication technologies, businesses are becoming more successful in their own as well as global markets. Technology, people and the environment/culture all come together to facilitate business intelligence.
The right intelligence on the organization’s side leads to increased profitability, decreased costs, improved customer relationship management (CRM) and decreased risks.
UNDERSTANDING COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
With the growing number of companies offering the same products in the same market, a company needs to have something extra to survive. A company, in today’s world, not only needs to get acquainted with the latest technologies and its customer’s needs, but should also know more about its competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Furthermore, organizations should also keep in mind the fact that as they might be using the competition’s information against them, the competitors will be doing the same to them. According to Deering (2002), any company facing competition for customers confronts the basic question, how do we anticipate and manage against initiatives intended to cut our share of the market?
This knowledge is known as the Competitive Intelligence. Using this knowledge, a company can survive and gain a strategic advantage in domestic or global market.
Hence, competitive intelligence (CI) is defined as the process of collecting and examining the data about their competitors and using it to gain an advantage over competitors in the market place. Kellogg USA President Gary costly says,” The big payoff for competitive intelligence is that it will point out weaknesses that you have internally because of the strengths of your competitors. Companies that don’t have this will fail.”(Prescott, 2001, p.xi)
UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
“Knowledge management involves best leveraging knowledge internally and externally in an organization and creating a process for valuing the organizations intangible assets.”(Liebowitz, p. 3)

Conceptual framework: knowledge management processes
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This internal and external information is used towards making better decisions.
First the kind of knowledge required is identified. Once identified, this information is located or created. All the information collected is stored and organized in such a way so as to ensure proper sharing of this information. Hence, Knowledge Management is basically moving the right information between the right people within an organization so that they can use this information and on the basis of this information act for the betterment of their organization.
This knowledge is disseminated/shared using the intranet system. Further, it is information stored is checked continuously so as to make sure that the content is fresh. This also ensures reusability of the information. (Breeding, 2001, p.55)
Additionally, the core audience also gets access to this information. In this way redundant questions can be eliminated and work can be done faster.
STRATEGIC PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT
Dr Gillette says, “Strategy is coordinated action through time to achieve a goal.” (Gillette, p.3) A leader is the one who decides what strategy to follow for the success of the organization. It is he who is the main contributing factor in a strategy’s success or failure. Synergy between leadership, knowledge management, business intelligence, and competitive intelligence creates strategic intelligence.
According to Dr Gillette, for a successful strategy development, leaders and knowledge workers need to keep these four steps in mind:
1. Strategic intelligence: The leaders and the knowledge workers need to perform the following strategic intelligence actions:
a. Environmental scanning and Situation analysis: For a company to be able to compete in the market, it should gather the information from economic, technical, cultural/social, political/legal areas. Once collected, filtered and organized, the company should seek an “analysis of the external situation affecting your organization – it is the context in which you operate.” (Gillette, p.6)
b. S W T O analysis: The company should, in this phase, focus on itself and take an internal review of the organization. It analyzes its Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities. (Gillette, p.6)
2. Action options: Dr Gillette states that “Strategic planning always produces options for actions to take”. He further adds that there should always be more than two possible option actions. Additionally, the author states that for an organization to win an organization needs, “a good offense and defense, plus a combination that takes them both into account.” A defense can never win by itself and offense will fail if its strength fails. Hence both are required. (Gillette, p.7)
3. Agreement mechanisms for cooperation: Once the options have been agreed upon, a leader must “check and repair” the organization’s “mechanisms for cooperative action.” (Gillette, p.8)
4. Communication links for coordinated action: To carry out a synchronized action, communication within the organization’s people should be proper and complete. The options should be communicated to all the leaders and the knowledge workers. (Gillette, p.9)
Furthermore, feedback from all corners should be accepted and encouraged to ensure two way communications. A good leader can motivate the organizations by providing appropriate feedback. In other words, a good leader would welcome and accept feedback from members of one’s team and those within the organization as a whole. Feedback is important and it can be used to increase performance of employee, as well as create an open environment in which people are keen to discuss both successes and failures.
CONCLUSION
An organization requires intelligence to survive and succeed in the market. This knowledge gained should reach everyone in the organization to ensure effective use of this knowledge for the better of the organization. Using this information, actions should be decided and taken to reach to the goal fixed.
Finally, it’s the leader who is the contributing factor to the strategy's failure or success. A good leader will help to rescue even the most obviously failing strategy.

REFERENCE
1. Dr. Gillette, Strategy Development for the Information Economy: A Practical Guide to Coordinated Action through Time
2. Dr. Gillette, Leadership for the Information renaissance: Clarity, Challenges, Opportunity.
3. Jay Liebowitz, Strategic Intelligence: Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, And Knowledge Management ,Auerbach Publications
4. Deering B.J. (2002) Chapter 11: KM for competitive advantage: mining diverse sources for marketing intelligence. Knowledge Management Strategy and Technology. Bellaver R.F. & Lusa J.M. Editors. Artech House.
5. Breeding, Bret. “CI and KM Convergence: A Case Study at Shell Services International.” Proven Strategies in Competitive Intelligence: Lessons From the Trenches. Prescott, John E. and Miller, Stephen H. Wiley Publishers, 2001
6. Prescott, John E. and Miller, Stephen H. Proven Strategies in Competitive Intelligence: Lessons from the Trenches. Wiley Publishers, 2001
7. Tzu, Sun. Attack by Stratagem. The Art of War. Tzu, Sun. NuVision Publications, LLC – Publisher. 2005.
8. Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for A Management Revolution, HarperPerennial: A division of Harper Collins Publishers, 1991.
9. Sharma, Shveta. Leadership: How Princes Should Keep Faith.
10. France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer, Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective, October 2002. http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper141.html
11. Innovation Vs. Implementation, Business Innovation Insider, <http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/2005/11/06-week/>