حسابرسی یک واحد هوشمندی رقابتی Audit of a Competitive Intelligence Unit

Introduction The Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) define competitive intelligence (CI) as “the process of monitoring the competitive environment and analyzing the findings in the context of internal issues, for the purpose of decision support” (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 2011). The implementation of the culture of competitive intelligence in the Spanish business environment has seen significant development over the last decade, as indicated in the works of Arcos (2010) and Velasco and Arcos (2012) and in the research of Du Toit (2015) and how CI has developed as an academic subject field. This development has allowed entrepreneurs to learn to conceptually decouple CI from other concepts such as industrial espionage (West, 2001; Attaway Morris, 1999). CI has evolved to a synergistic integrated CI in an integrated intelligence synergy model, including the methodical collective from different intelligence pools as economic intelligence, business intelligence, customer intelligence, competitive technical intelligence, and competitor intelligence, (Bulger, 2016). As senior managers in different Spanish companies identify CI as a strategic business tool, they will incorporate employees with specific training in the units considered appropriate, as in other countries that are implementing CI in the last decades, such as Canada (Calof & Breakspear, 1999), Portugal (Santos & Correia, 2010), South Africa (Sewdass & Du Toit, 2014), (Strauss & Du Toit, 2010), Latvia (Cekuls, 2010), or Israel (Barnea, 2016). As Colakoglu (2011) and Nasri (2012) have shown, the CI process influences the quality of information and how this information subsequently influences strategic benefits expansion in companies. Examples of company programs and actions include Boeing, Dupont, and Royal Dutch Shell Group (Calof & Smith, 2010; Calof, 2014b). However, the Spanish entrepreneur can see that the implementation of CI in his country is relatively recent and he has certain clear expectations of the return sought (Gaidelys, 2010), (Chi & Yan, 2011), but he does not know how to implement it, the first hindrance to its success. A second weakness in the success of implementation is in the lack of professional experience of those trained in the area in Spain. Only in recent years are the first cohorts of graduates trained specifically in this field of study entering the labor market, making it difficult to advise senior management in relation to how to implement this strategic tool (CI) in the organization.