Tired Of Doing Analysis The Same Old Way? Need To Learn Something New? Then You Need To Attend THIS Symposium!

One of the top complaints I hear from analysts is that they do not get enough exposure to new analytic methodologies.  While the pace of technology and information collection has done nothing but accelerate, analysts oftentimes seem to be stuck in a time warp - using the same old methods in much the same old ways.

The Mercyhurst Chapter of the Society of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) is doing something about that this Spring!

They have put together a one-day symposium on April 20 that will walk the attendees through a variety of new or rarely used methodologies that are perfect for business applications.  Covered methods include Social Network Analysis, Geospatial Preparation Of the Environment, Suitability Models and Strategic Group Mapping.  

Beyond the methods covered, the local chapter here has done an outstanding job of bringing in three must-hear keynote speakers:  Michelle Settecase, the Leader of Competitive Intelligence for the Global Markets Division of Ernst and Young; Mike Finnegan, the Manager of Enterprise Risk Intelligence for Target Corporation; and Patrick Daly, the Manager of Competitive Intelligence for Parker Hannifin.

Reduced rate registration is only available until 20 March, so hurry!

How Many Entry-Level Intelligence (Or Intelligence-like) Analysts Will The Business Sector Need In The Next 12 Months?

Good question, right?

If you have direct knowledge of information that might help answer the question in the title or you have indirect knowledge that is relevant to the answer to the question in the title, please take 2 minutes to complete this survey.  

What do I mean by direct and indirect knowledge?

Direct knowledge means that you know personally or have good information concerning the hiring plans of your agency or organization (or at least your section or division).  You might work in HR or be a manager with hiring responsibilities. 

Indirect knowledge is information that is relevant to the question that is not due to your direct responsibilities.  You might have spoken with an HR manager or have been involved in meetings where this issue was discussed. 

We are NOT looking for opinion based on purely circumstantial information.  If you are not involved in the hiring process either directly or indirectly, please DO NOT take this survey.

What do I mean by "Intelligence (or Intelligence-like)..."? 

First, I am not talking about private sector companies that support the US national security intelligence community.  Those jobs have already been covered by our National Security Jobs Report earlier this year.

Second, jobs which require the skill set of an intelligence analyst are rarely labelled as such within the business community.  You will have to use your best judgment here.  If you or your organization employs people that look at the external environment - at things that are critical to the success or failure of your business but are, in some way, outside the control of your business (competitive analysis is one such area, but so is Banking Secrecy Act compliance) - then you are looking at an "intelligence-like" position.

Why are we interested?

Every year, other disciplines announce hiring projections for the year:  "This year's hot jobs are for engineers and chimney sweeps."  That sort of thing.  Entry level intelligence analysts who are searching for a job, on the other hand, receive no such guidance.

We hope to change that.  Working with one of our hot-shot grad students, Greg Marchwinski, we put together this survey to get a better feel for the the job market for entry level analysts for the year ahead.

Once we get enough survey data, Greg will compile it and combine it with the macro-level, mostly qualitative data that we already have and put together a "jobs report" for the year ahead.  I will publish it here once we are done.

Finally, we have already completed our national security jobs report for next year and will follow this business survey with our law enforcement survey.

Thanks for your participation!

What Do Decisionmakers Want From Intelligence? (Global Intelligence Forum)

globalintelligenceforum.com

One of the most important questions any intelligence professional can ask is "What do the decisionmakers I support want from me?"  Historically, it is also one of the most difficult questions to answer.

That is the reason why the faculty at Mercyhurst nominated Intelligence and the Decisionmaker as the theme for this year's Global Intelligence Forum in Dungarvan, Ireland (July 11-13, 2011).

Looking at the line-up of speakers -- GEN Mike Hayden, Charlie Allen, Hayden Peake from the US, Kathleen O'Toole from Ireland, Anthony Campbell from Canada, Niki Ekman from Sweden, Cees Wiebes from the Netherlands, etc. etc. -- and it easy to see why I think we are going to make some progress on this question.

Two other things make this conference one of a kind.  The first is the attendees.  This conference draws people from all three major sub-disciplines of intelligence:  National security, law enforcement and business.  Not only does it draw people from all areas of intelligence, it also draws people from all over the world.  

So you are going to see guys like Tom Carr, the executive director of the Washington Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program rubbing shoulders with Liam Fahey, founder and executive director of the Intelligence Leadership Forum, the organization for senior corporate intelligence professionals.  

There is simply no other conference that brings together this kind of mix of professionals for this kind of conference.  Everyone I spoke with last year took as much away from the interaction between the participants as they did from the speakers.

Which is a nice segue to the second big advantage:  Dungarvan.  What a beautiful place!  Located on the southern Irish coast in the midst of one of the prettiest parts of Ireland, Dungarvan is a perfect place for mixing, making new personal and professional relationships and carving out some time to think about some of the important questions facing the profession.  Extraordinary hospitality, simple pleasures and (my personal favorite) an outstanding local beer make this event both physically relaxing and intellectually energizing. 

We had to turn away people last year so this year we found a larger space and have expanded to 200 (and only 200) attendees.  

Registration and more info about the conference is available online here.  We are also offering two, one day workshops to round out the week. More information on the workshops here.

Questions regarding sponsorship opportunities for your company or organization should be directed to Bob Heibel, Executive Director of the Mercyhurst College Institute For Intelligence Studies at rheibel at mercyhurst dot edu.

Best Companies To Work For -- For Entry-level Intelligence Analysts! (Fortune.com And Original Research)

Every year, Fortune Magazine posts a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the US. This is a very good list but it doesn't quite answer the question my students ask: "What is the best company to work for as an intel analyst?"

Thanks to one of our superb grad students, Nimalan Paul, we now have an answer!

Nimalan started with Fortune's list and made the initial assumption that, out of the 1000's of companies in the US, if you made the list at all you must be a pretty good place to work (Note: Nimalan used the list from 2006 as it was already available as a spreadsheet.  The vast majority of the companies from 2006 are still on the list today and since rank on the Fortune list did not matter in Nimalan's analysis, using the 2006 list seems acceptable).

From there, he thought long and hard about the criteria that would indicate that a company was good for entry level intel analysts.  He settled on  six factors:

• How many intel analyst (or intel analyst equivalent) slots are currently open?
• How many intel analysts appear to be employed by the company?
• At what level are the analysts employed?
• Is there a separate role for intel analysts within the company?
• Is there an internship program for intel analysts?
• Is there an executive level (C-level) position within the company responsible for intelligence?

He looked high and low for information on these six factors and compiled everything he found into the list you see below.  You can click on the second worksheet for his raw observations but he took it another step and actually scored each of the companies based on what he saw (you can see his scoring in the first or currently viewable worksheet).

The scoring is a bit subjective, of course (such that Nimalan indicated to me that the percentage scores are probably best interpreted as + or - 15% or so.  In other words, there is a real difference between a 60% and a 90% but probably not much actual difference between a 90% and a 95%).

Likewise, Nimalan was looking at companies that have intel positions in business exclusively.  He did not count contractual analyst positions provided by any of these companies to the US national security intelligence community.

Finally, we can't consider the list definitive.  Nimalan's ability to gather info on the companies was limited by time and access and we both acknowledge that there are likely some great places for analysts to work that didn't make it to Fortune's list.  If you know of any (and particularly if they are currently hiring...), please leave a note in the comments!

Intelligence Tools For Understanding Any Website (YouTube)

Jeffrey Kotvas on the always insightful Competitive Intelligence Forum points to the excellent video below that reviews various online tools for understanding the traffic patterns behind any website (sort of a modern and open-source version of the much more venerable intel sub-discipline of traffic analysis...).

The video, put together by Scrappybusiness.com, focuses on the use of these tools by intelligence professionals in the business world but these tools might also be of some use to amateur (and, perhaps, professional) cyberthreat analysts as well. 



For those of you not familiar with the Competitive Intelligence Forum, I recommend you check it out as well. There are lots of good places to talk about intelligence on the internet these days but the CI Forum is one of the best. Founded by longtime CI professional, Arik Johnson, this social networking site for those involved in intelligence work for the business community has really taken off and now boasts over 1300 members. Click on this link to preview the site.

Related Post: 
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools To Do Intel Analysis

Part 4 -- Even Better News!! (How To Get A Job In Intelligence)

(Note: First, I apologize to all about the frequency of these posts. Life is getting in the way, unfortunately, and the best I can do right now is move forward in fits and starts. Second, if you are new to the series or have not yet had a chance, I strongly recommend you take a look at the previous posts and, in particular, the comments. Many people have taken the time to add their own insights to mine or to ask good questions which I have tried to answer. The series is more useful to everyone due to their efforts.)

Part 1 -- Introduction
Part 2 -- The Intelligence Job Market From 20,000 Feet
Part 3 -- The Good News!

The skills that the intelligence professional possesses are in high demand throughout the business world. In fact, the President's Council Of Economic Advisers recently issued a report that stated, "Employers value workers who can think critically and solve problems. Many highly-paid occupations require workers with good analytic and interactive skills." Sounds like an intel analyst to me (except for maybe the "highly paid" part...).

In fact, the largest and the fastest growing job market for intelligence and, in particular, intelligence analysts, is likely to be companies who need the skills that the typical intelligence analyst possesses in order to understand the broad range of largely unstructured data that confronts the corporate decisionmaker.

Our own conservative estimate is that there are close to half a million jobs currently in this market and more than 50,000 (yes, 50,000) jobs will be added over the next 5-10 years. These numbers are based on a variety of statistics but before I get into those, I need to outline some of the challenges in this area.

The Challenges

The first problem is definitional. The same Council Of Economic Advisers report I cited above also says, "In 2003, for example, a quarter of American workers were in jobs that were not even listed among the Census Bureau’s Occupation codes in 1967, and technological change has only accelerated since then." Needless to say, "intelligence analyst" wasn't (and still isn't) one of them.

What do we call intelligence professionals working in the business world? When you want to do a job search, what key terms do you use?

Well, one you shouldn't use is "business intelligence". This term has been appropriated by a wide variety of software companies who produce applications that allow companies to examine in greater detail the structured information that they already have. This information is mostly about the internal workings of the organization and the output of these programs is designed to support recommendations for improving the efficiency or profitability of a company's operations.

These software packages typically do not focus on analyzing the unstructured data that swirls around the outside of the organization. In short, it is not the kind of "intelligence" we are talking about here. Our kind of intelligence focuses on events and organizations that are outside the control of but still relevant to the business we are tasked to support. This data -- which can include blog posts and tweets and random emails -- is largely unstructured and requires a vastly different skill set and methods to understand.

So, if not business intelligence, then what? I have done dozens of studies for businesses of all sizes. In almost all cases, the CEOs and managers I have worked with are interested in two things: Where is my market and what are my competitors doing? It is no surprise then that the terms "competitive intelligence" and "market intelligence" are worth using to find jobs.

Check out the growth rates in the two charts below for jobs bearing these terms (found by my colleague, Prof. Shelly Freyn on one of the better job search engines out there, Indeed.com):


The problem is that these terms are not industry standards. You could just as easily search for jobs as a "market analyst" or a "research analyst" or a "marketing specialist in competitive research" or many others. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the term "market research analysts" but it is unclear precisely which kinds of jobs this definition includes. The wide variety of terms (coupled with the red herring of "business intelligence") makes hunting for the right kind of intelligence job in the business world a bit of a pain.

The second challenge is getting employers to recognize the need for intelligence. We know, for example, of a number of companies who refuse to call the positions "intelligence" positions because they think it implies that they practice industrial espionage. You can usually get past this objection with some discussion (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professional's and the American Marketing Association's positions on the ethics of their professions go a long way towards alleviating some of these concerns).

Even if you can get past the spook factor, though, there is still a perception by many businesses that they do not need intelligence. My technique in these cases is to ask the managers and executives I deal with, "Who in your company has it as a fundamental part of their job -- as part of their job description -- to systematically examine all the factors relevant to your company's success but outside your company's control, integrate those factors as necessary and provide estimates of how those factors will change over time in order to support your planning processes?"

The answers vary, of course. Some companies have market analysts but they are not tasked to look at the competition. Others have competitive intelligence and market analysts but clearly have other intelligence needs that aren't being met (like the company with a global presence that needs to understand if its employees are likely to get kidnapped or the company who transports critical raw materials in ships that travel off the coast of Somalia...).

Even if all the various needs are covered, no one is integrating the reports, coordinating the activities or providing meaningful estimates about how conditions are likely to change. Some places have even told me that performing this function is "everyone's job" but I just laugh (I can do that because I am a professor and not a consultant).

No matter what the answer, the discussion leads to the follow-on question: "Don't you think it would be useful to have someone who does all this for you?" The answer is always, "Yes" but it still translates only slowly, if at all, into intelligence jobs.

Even if the company or organization accepts the need for intelligence and even if there is job position available, the final challenge is to get the business to understand the kind of intelligence qualifications necessary for the job. All too often companies look to particular degree fields which are inappropriate for their needs. The most common example is looking for a specialist when a generalist would do a better job.

Imagine you are an engineering company and you have lots of engineers who do engineering stuff really well. You need to understand the environment -- political, social, economic, competitive -- in which the company will be operating. Who do you hire? Too often, I see this kind of company go after an engineer to fill this kind of analytic position.

This is an expensive mistake. The engineer that gets hired to do this is likely just waiting to move to a "real" engineering position and costing the company an arm and a leg in the process. In addition, this new hire will speak the language of engineering but is less well prepared than an intel analyst (who wants the job and is likely to stay in it) to look at the broader range of issues in which the company is interested.

Back To The Numbers

Despite these challenges, the market potential here for intelligence analysts is enormous, dwarfing the numbers of analysts needed in the Law Enforcement or National Security realms.

According to data Shelly found on the Bureau of Labor Statistics site, the number of "market research analysts" alone is set to rise from 234,000 in 2006 to 281,000 (+47,000) by 2016. Other analyst positions within the business community are almost certainly at least partially intelligence analyst positions by another name. How many of the 236,000 "financial analysts", for example, are actually looking that the risk posed by political factors in foreign countries in much the same way as a CIA Desk Officer? If it is anything close to 10%, then the number of jobs in this sector alone exceeds the total number of analysts (17,000) in the US national security intelligence community. Under these circumstances, I feel more than comfortable with a 50,000 increase estimate.

Resolving the challenges inherent in getting a job in the corporate world as an intel analyst are going to take some time. Intelligence has to grow up as a discipline and realize that is more than James Bond or George Smiley. Until this happens, it is unlikely that the world of corporate intelligence will become easier to move around in. In the meantime, see the job hunt as a test of your analytic skills with the full knowledge that these woods are full of game.

Next: Beyond The Big Three

SCIP Webinar On Evaluating Intelligence (Self-promotion)

I will be conducting a webinar for the Society Of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) on evaluating intelligence on 10 JUN 09 at 1200 EST. I will be going over some of the material in the "evaluating intelligence" series of posts I did earlier this year as well as adding some new stuff that has come along since then.

My goal is to make the material and ideas concerning the evaluation of intelligence a bit more accessible (One of the particular advantages of this format is that it allows for questions during and after the presentation).

I have not done a webinar before so it should be interesting. You can find out more info here: Webinar -- Evaluating Intelligence

(Note: The webinar is not, unfortunately, free. SCIP is a non-profit organization but needs to -- I am assuming -- cover its costs for setting up and running the webinar. I am not charging anything for my time and am getting no compensation for this event.)