By Janet Ellen Raasch

Every professional service provider understands they have to make intelligent business decisions. Decisions made in a vacuum or based on (often faulty) internal assumptions, do not fill the bill. Truly intelligent business decisions are made within the context of the external competitive environment.

The way to accomplish this is through the use of competitive intelligence (CI) -- a systematic and ethical program for the collection, analysis and management of outside information.

Jillian Weisberg, an expert on CI for The Thomson Corporation, outlined the benefits of CI in a presentation to the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association, on May 8 in Denver, Colorado.

Weisberg used law firms an example of how CI works, and thereby offered insights into how CSI might work among other professional services.

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