The successful design, development and deployment of a successful CI system requires a good project plan. Much like a roadmap, this plan serves to identify important milestones and provide information about alternative routes that can help the project team(s) avoid delays. According to a survey by the Delphi Group, 58% of the useful knowledge of an organization is recorded information (documents and databases) and 42% resides in employee brains (Hickens 1999). Integrating knowledge management and competitive intelligence encourages their use, improves their quality and allows the firm to respond more rapidly to changing business conditions (Senge 1994), so the best CI system uses what is already inside the organization. One of the first decisions is whether to improve access to the organization's recorded information or elicit knowledge that currently resides in employee brains. Regardless of format or location, an organization's knowledge is generally filtered through both a cognitive dimension and a relationship dimension. The cognitive dimension focuses on the "stuff," but to identify the important attributes of the relevant "stuff," it is important to know how it is filtered through the relationship dimension. The relationship dimension has the following characteristics: 1. Purpose ― the organization's business purpose, its vision, mission, goals and objectives 2. Process ― the means by which strategic initiatives are moved from "clean sheet" to launch 3. People ― the "4 ics" (1). Demographics ― personal characteristics of current and potential users (e.g., position, education and training, learning style) (2). Psychographics ― personal belief systems that impact action/reaction/interaction (3). Geographies - factors of culture, distance and time (4). Politics ― formal/informal lines of authority, innovation and trust (Shelfer and Goodrum 1999) The planning process and the project itself must take these characteristics into consideration in order to be successful. In fact, the successful CI system might also be likened to the steps involved in successful community gardening: (1) seed the ground. (2) water and fertilize what you plant; (3) weed the garden; (4) reward the gardeners; (5) discourage the predators; and (6) harvest the value.
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