Intelligence
PSG provides a global strategic research and corporate intelligence service, dedicated to providing a unique range of support services to corporate and private clients.
Our in house experts are fully trained and experienced at both the governmental and corporate levels in the fields of:
- Commercial Intelligence
- Competitor Intelligence
- Business Intelligence
- Market research
These fields are often confused, mislabeled or fused. PSG has developed therefore some very clear strategic services, with proven methodologies and protocols for each.
A description of each of these services, is given below.
In summary however, we say that whoever the client and whatever the need, the value of Intelligence in any context is best summed up by the motto of the United Kingdom Intelligence Corps (Army):
“Manui Dat Cognitio Vires” – “Knowledge gives strength to the arm”
Definitions of our Corporate Intelligence services:
Commercial Intelligence
This is best described as is the highest and most comprehensive form of legal, ethical open source intelligence.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is an information processing discipline that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. In the Intelligence Community (IC), the term “open” refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources).The skill with commercial intelligence, as with the ” 4 stage intelligence cycle” in general – Collection – Collation – Analysis – Dissemination, is in having not only the ability to reach out, look through and analyze the data, but in having subject matter experts in every industry available to create an intelligent report based in the needs of a specific client. We have this.
Competitor Intelligence
A broad definition of Competitive Intelligence is the action of gathering, analyzing, and applying information about products, domain constituents, customers, and competitors for the short term and long term planning needs of an organization.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is both a process and a product. The process of collecting, storing and analyzing information about a competitive arena, results in the actionable output of intelligence required by a client at a specific time.
Note that:
1. Competitive Intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice. (This is important as CI professionals emphasize that the discipline is not the same as industrial espionage which is both unethical and usually illegal).
2. The focus is on the external business environment.
3. There is a process involved in gathering information, converting it into intelligence and then utilizing this in business decision making. CI professionals emphasize that if the intelligence gathered is not usable, then it is not “intelligence”.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, knowledge, technologies, applications, quality, risks, security issues and practices used to help a business to acquire a better understanding of market behavior and commercial context.
BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data already gathered into a data warehouse and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support the use of this information by assisting in the extraction, analysis, and reporting of information.
Common functionality of business intelligence applications includes analysis of finances reports, OLAP, general analytics, use of dashboards, scorecards, data mining, corporate performance management (CPM), and predictive analysis.
Business intelligence — the term dates at least to 1958 — aims to support better business decision-making.
Market research
Market research often refers to either primary or secondary.
Primary market research involves quantative research such as focus groups, surveys, field tests, interviews or observation, conducted or tailored specifically to that product. Primary market research is useful for finding new information and getting customers views on products.
Secondary research howver is relatively cheap and easily accessible information. Disadvantages of secondary research are that it is often not specific to your area of research and the data used can be biased and difficult to validate.
Advantages are that it provides up to date, relevant and specific information to your product. The disadvantages are that it is expensive to collect, time consuming and needs a large sample size to be accurate.
Our clients are assured of complete discretion at all times.
We only discuss details of our intelligence services, when engaged by a credible client following a vetting process.
