Information or 'Intel'? It's not the same thing.
If there’s one common, extremely counterproductive, misnomer in use in the business development arena today, it would have to be the use of “information” as synonymous with “intelligence”.
Information and intelligence are
not the same thing.
If you, as a director, C-suite executive or other organisational leader, rely on the “intel” being fed up the line to you from your business development personnel and any other key frontliners, you need to make sure what you really are getting is “intelligence”.
Information becomes intelligence only after it is first taken apart, comprehensively considered, and processed in such a way that it becomes meaningful in the specific context of that for which that information was sourced or otherwise collected . . . for example a priority pursuit.
Unprocessed “information” is nothing more than raw data. Confuse the two at your own peril.
If you, as an enterprise leader (and, arguably, in that sense, chief rainmaker), wish to make full and strategic use of the inputs you’re having fed up the line to you, you need to know the degree to which it is intelligence, and the degree to which it’s still “just data”.
No good thinking you’ve got everything you need to inform you of a critical peer-to-peer meeting in the boardroom of a potential key client – only to find you’ve got a briefcase full of unchecked, outdated or partially-correct assumptions.
The ‘Info-to-Intel’ Conversion Process
As I point out in my bid leadership courses, one of the classic approaches to converting “information” into “intelligence” is to take a piece of data and ask “So What?” i.e. in terms of the pursuit in question.
But there’s a problem with that simplistic, surface-level approach: More often than not, there’s no further “value-added” processing phase conducted to turn what are really still raw inputs, into news that can be fully and optimally used.
And even if there’s workshop or two, in the context of a formal bid process, no-one digs down deep enough:
The answer to a well-asked “So What?” will, more often than not, lead to another question . . . and that question will most likely be a quality question. In turn, the answer to that question must be found – or at least the best possible assumption made.
Thus, the process of converting raw “information” into competitively valuable “intelligence” has multiple layers, the number of which is not determinable from the outset.
This is the type of genuine “intel” that should – in addition to informing a bid or other pursuit – be provided to a Chief Executive, Group Head, or other senior executive. It is this depth of research and the contextualised presentation thereof, that places an organisation’s leadership in a well-informed, confident position when entering into any C-suite-level meetings with particularly mission-critical client organisations.
