Scenario of business practices in competitive intelligence within the telecommunication industry

The present paper sought to apply the theoretical framework of Wright-Pickton on Competitive Intelligence (CI) to the business practice reality within the telecommunications industry in Brazilian firms. The aim of the study was to examine the current Brazilian scenario, which is to contribute to the improvement of that model. With this in mind, we devised a set of managerial advice in view of enhancing the Competitive Intelligence function, thus acknowledging such feature as being vital to the strategic decision-making process. Herein, the telecommunications industry has been thoroughly investigated in its value chain. To this end, the data collection was conducted through in-depth interviews with the executives in charge of the areas or functions that were comparable to the concept of Competitive Intelligence in their respective companies. Finally, the conclusions show that both aspects "data collection" and "use of CI outputs" are distant from what the Framework recognizes as ideal. Consequently, those points still need effective betterments to approximate the practice as much as possible of the company's strategy. Ultimately, this paper brings to light some pivotal discussions towards what CI is and its applications in business decision-making processes to add new insights to the theoretical framework of practice.   Key words: Competitive intelligence, Brazilian scenario, market analysis, Wright-Pickton, telecommunications.