Extended Teams

A competitive intelligence (CI) operational team structure is critical for the long-term success of a CI practice. This includes virtual teams and Extended teams, as well as executives or other higher-ups in a company.

The field is your customers, which is where your field champions come in to provide feedback and insight. The next step is your Extended teams. This team is another aspect of addressing the problem of scale. Their overall purpose is to assist the CI team with IT integrations and other corporate policies. They are grounded in their relationship with IT, as well as HR, marketing, legal, or procurement. Typical expectations including providing aid for new module releases, as well as support for compliance, procurement, and other functions.

Addressing Scale

In order to address scale, CI teams need IT solutions. CRM solutions address problems of scale for sales organizations, ERP for other systems. CI also needs a strong relationship to IT to build and maintain their own system.

CI team should meet with an external team regularly

Ed promotes that a CI team should meet with an external team regularly. Quarterly meetings should be sufficient for a team, after the buildup of an initial project. When you move higher up in the levels of organization, it becomes more important to build the relationship with an extended team. Do you have policies for sharing information? What is the legal department’s opinions on a practice? An extended team is a key component of moving through organizational levels because they can address and deal with these types of questions.

An extended team is usually located in the headquarters, but might have regional representatives. Most importantly, they must understand corporate procedures and goals. This is useful for helping plan things like corporate releases, rather than researching new products or analysis feedback. Overall, the extended team fits into and supports operational team structures, and stay in touch with other things going on around the organizations. CI isn’t just about analysis, it’s about knowing what to do with that analysis, and using it to create great organization and market influence.