Social competitive intelligence: Socio-technical themes and values for the networking organization

Abstract

This article introduces the notion of social competitive intelligence, meaning competitive intelligence (CI) for the networking organization. A novel socio-technical framework called the Social CI Framework (SCIF) is presented, intended for analysis and design of social CI processes, methods and tools. By using a socio-technical perspective, both social and technical aspects are considered together in SCIF. The framework is founded on theory related to enterprise 2.0 and wikinomics, and is intended to be used to study social CI using principles such as openness, participation, sharing and co-creation. The presented results are based on a literature review and an exploratory study with interviews of CI experts from Swedish organiza- tions. SCIF explicitly distinguishes between task-oriented models and collaboration models, and models of different socio-technical perspectives. Moreover, SCIF uses the mechanisms of socio-technical themes and a socio-technical value map that relate the theoretical and empirical characteristics with the SCIF modeling method.