Competitive Intelligence as a System Application Discipline

The article describes a new approach to activities performed in Competitive Intelligence. In the introduction, current approaches of contemporary authors describing work in Competitive Intelligence are outlined. Routineness in the work of Competitive Intelligence departments in companies is typical for all of the described approaches. The author deems such approaches inadequate. The author presents his views on the approach to the basic concept of managing processes taking place in Competitive Intelligence department of a company. He sees the solution in designing Competitive Intelligence as a system application discipline. This means that processes performed in Competitive Intelligence departments will be approached similarly as, e.g., tasks in value analysis and value engineering. The author resolves the challenge by using the so-called user functions, from which he subsequently derives internal functions of a Competitive Intelligence system.