Actionable intelligence

The term “actionable” indicates that actions can, and should, be made to take advantage of the information. Actionable intelligence comes into picture when an organization wants to act based on past experiences or behaviors.

When organizations gain their position in the market because of analysis done through actionable intelligence, then it is called competitive intelligence.

Some examples of actionable intelligence include the competitor’s price range, target demographics, marketing budget, etc. Organizations can use actionable intelligence to enhance their market position by performing competitor analysis.

Actionable intelligence is often done on Big Data, where there are large amounts of data. When decision-making is done with this data, it produces very accurate results. Actionable intelligence aids in the future planning of an organization and can enhance an organization’s market performance.

A company could gather data on sales of their product in stores versus the sales of other leading products and find out where they need to advertise more and where they should place more products. This information that will give them a boost over their competition is considered actionable intelligence. This information must be gathered in a legal way, however, because certain methods of obtaining this information may be illegal or considered corporate espionage.

Unlike Business Intelligence (BI), which just provides a faster assessment of the data, actionable intelligence takes the process step further. Actionable intelligence provides a thorough plan based on the previous experiences of an organization; this strategy yields the best probable results.