An Intelligence Strategy is built around the recognition of Intelligence as a vital strategic asset to a business or organisation to achieve competitive advantage, and enable profitable long-term growth.

An effective Intelligence Strategy sets the organisation’s objectives for managing and applying intelligence, and combines a policy and plan for the formalized and institutionalized acquisition & management of information as a strategic asset.

An Intelligence Strategy should define the information assets required by a business to enable accurate assessments and evaluations, which in turn empower executives to identify the best options and reach the right conclusions when defining the strategies it will pursue in the future.

An Intelligence Strategy should identify the range of sources for the required information assets, and ensure that those sources are constantly aligned with the strategic, tactical, and operational needs for applying that information.

An Intelligence Strategy should define the process & priorities for acquiring, and collecting the information that the business requires, within the resources available to it. In doing so the strategy should ensure the optimum use of resource in acquiring information assets.

An Intelligence Strategy should define a process for managing intelligence to ensure the effective processing, sharing, and dissemination of information to the relevant stakeholders, which will maximize the current value of the information assets. An integral part of the strategy intelligence management should be an ongoing valuation of the intelligence assets to hand, based on their relevance and depreciation over time.

An Intelligence Strategy should define the direction and scope of information gathering objectives to fulfil the intelligence application priorities for decision-makers, and the common objectives of the organisation.

An Intelligence Strategy should ensure the long-term cumulative growth in value of the organisation’s collective knowledge and learning, through the effective collection, organisation, and collation of information.