Organizational structure of competitive intelligence activities: A South African case study

Without a proper and appropriate intelligence process and structure, it is difficult to develop intelligence in an enterprise. Companies' efforts to weigh the determining factors of strategic versus tactical needs, decentralized organizational structures, and the focus of decision making lead to the availability of three general organizational structures for the intelligence function, namely highly centralized systems that report to a single corporate entity, decentralized systems that typically incorporate multiple intelligence units serving several organizational components, or hybrid systems that combine features of both previous options. A case study of how competitive intelligence is organized in a South African company, Automaker Inc., is presented.