Insight 1 from Research Focus on Intelligence - change your mind, change your world
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

In what terms do you think of newsletters and alerts? As current awareness tools, or part of an intelligence system? In this Insight blog, Robin Neidorf describes how shifting towards the intelligence mindset can deliver important benefits to your business.

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"Intelligence" drives business action; "current awareness" describes knowledge.

Guess which has more value?

Most information teams describe newsletters and alerts as their current awareness service. Instead, we need to think of them as one output of intelligence systems.

Mere semantics? Hardly. Shifting towards the intelligence mindset delivers important benefits:

1. Focus on impact: As with other aspects of your service, you want to understand, report on and improve impact. "Intelligence" drives business action, while "awareness" describes a state of mind.
   
   
2. Align with technology trends: Software and platforms for "intelligence" are evolving and maturing at a galloping rate. By turning your attention to these developments, you are better positioned to leverage them (and make the business case for them) to streamline and improve both process and impact.

If your stakeholders believe that a quality newsletter can be generated "with the push of a button", that's a signal to educate them on the complexity of your intelligence system, whether manual or machine-aided.

Newsletters and alerts will continue to be the format of choice for most users in the near term, but that's likely to change. However, the need for intelligence will never abate. Make the mental shift today - the future is coming.

Here's what you can do:

• Get up to speed on how intelligence differs from current awareness, to better gauge where you may be heading

• Take a closer look at how to focus on impact, with our report, "Jinfo model - measuring the impact of current awareness"

• Our webinar, "Moving from current awareness to intelligence", takes place on 5th December

• November's Community session, "Closing the 'news is easy' perception gap", connects you with other information managers working on the same problem. Share solutions during this session on 19th November.

Work with Jinfo

When you've been delivering a service the same way for some time, it can be hard to reimagine it for the future.

The Jinfo Consulting workshop, "Awareness and intelligence evaluation" can be tailored to focus on the specific areas of your service delivery that you most want to work on - impact, sources, technology or operations. Learn more and enquire.

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