- 02
- JUN
- 2010
Red alert: Is your intelligence falling into the wrong hands?
Author: Michelle Perkins - Categories: Risk, Procurement Intelligence
A quick question – do you know where your intelligence is as you read this?
As the scope of market intelligence gathered by procurement organisations grows, then so does the amount of information provided to them. How many, though, are ensuring that their precious data doesn't fall into the wrong hands – and how many are working hard to make sure that their intelligence doesn't walk out of the building when a member of staff swaps one place of work for another?
Of course, the data that various procurement organisations collate – particularly relating to areas such as commodity pricing – is only valid for a finite period, but it only takes one person or one piece of slack security for it to fall into the wrong hands. And, if that happens, the competitive advantage that the information could have handed the company would be in serious danger of being lost.
So what are companies doing to mitigate this risk? Well, according to one leading figure, the answer is not a lot.
"It's not something I think that many people involved in market intelligence have really thought too much about," he says. "I suppose there's an awful lot of focus on the information itself and the way that it's collected, but I don't think keeping that data safe is something that is on many companies' agendas.
"In all the companies I've worked at, the assumption is that when you pass the intelligence to the people that use it they will use it and won't give it away. There has always been that assumption – because why would they? I've never had a conversation with anyone about how you stop your intelligence from leaking elsewhere."
And although intelligence becomes old very quickly, there could still be, conceivably, a window of opportunity where it could not only fall into the grateful hands of competitors, but could also be wasted by those for whom it was destined in the original instance.
Now I'm not claiming that the practice of giving away valuable intelligence is widespread, but what isn't in doubt is that, in our technological age, it doesn't take a giant leap of faith to conclude that data theft of this kind is a real and very present danger.
And it's one that procurement's intelligence gathering operations should not ignore.
