1. Mobile adoption goes mainstream. A significant majority of managers will access their information and intelligence products through phones and iPads. This will change how we format and organize them.
   
   
2. Interactive visualization becomes a requirement. Pictures and diagrams become preferred over words. This requires us to incorporate visualization software into our analyses and reports.
   
   
3. Early warning increases in importance. As the speed of change increases and the time available to make decisions decreases, more intelligence activity focuses on identifying trends and change triggers.
   
   
4. Clients expect a seamless and personalized experience. Internal stakeholders will expect to see more and highly customized intelligence content, delivered in the right time frame across multiple mobile platforms and devices. Easy to formulate but complex to deliver.
   
   
5. Intelligence tools Integrate with data analytics. Channels providing data from mobile, social media feeding into Business Intelligence (“big data”) software. This creates a good sense of customer perspective, better segmentation strategies, brand recognition, etc. and will help make intelligence more robust.
   
   
6. Global events require increased monitoring. The last decade has witnessed the acceleration of horizontal integration: trade, currency, accounting, computing, environmental responsibility, etc. Intelligence must help prepare management for adverse events of global magnitude.
   
   
7. Accelerated need to significantly broaden the scope of evaluation and analysis. Clients have a much higher expectation for our work to encompass not only direct competition, but also indirect competition, potential competitors who have the wherewithal to compete effectively, but have not been a factor in a specific market segment previously, and the various market disruptions that can quickly change competitive strengths/weaknesses.
   
   
8. Management demands to do more with less continue. Intelligence will be more about leveraging and making linkages with current assets. Examples along these lines include (re)engaging sales and internal staff in the CI process, making the most of networks, interviewing senior leaders and subject matter experts, 'word on the street', and focus on human intelligence.
   
   
9. Non-specialist personnel more involved in intelligence generation. Competitive intelligence professionals provide support, coordination and training, and advocate intelligence at all levels.
   
   
10. Intelligence activities will become more practical and less strategic. We will be asked to increase customer intimacy, increase customer retention rates and detect more business opportunities, etc. Intelligence teams will be spread across their corporations in business units, and their activity will be less centralized.

About the author

Bonnie Hohhof is the director of competitive research for SCIP and the editor of Competitive Intelligence Magazine. She has over 25 years of corporate experience, including the Corporate Strategy Offices of both Ameritech and Motorola. A charter member of SCIP, she also served on their Board of Directors, founded and edited the Competitive Intelligence Review and received the SCIP Fellow and Meritorious awards. She has a BA in Political Science from Northwestern University, an MS in Information Sciences from Dominican University and an MBA from Roosevelt University. She can be reached at bhohhof@scip.org, or 630-469-0732.