CoCI : Collaborative support of social competitive intelligence

The aim of the presented work has been to investigate how the existing concept of social CI can be used to support collaborative CI networks. A novel socio-technical solution CoCI consisting of a work method and tool have been designed for a scenario with an internal network of collaborative competitive intelligence (CI). The CoCI work method suggests using agile, freeform collaboration through an informal organizational network. A distinction is made between the roles of network coordinators, contributors, clients and receivers. The work style follows regular temporal iterative loops, or sprints, each one ending in some form of intelligence outcome. The CoCI tool supports collaborative daily work with reading, commenting and classifying incoming material, where the actions of the network members are visible to each other. Furthermore, the CoCI tool supports having meetings using the tool where incoming material from the sprint is reviewed and a report is created. In the evaluation of the tool, the dimensions engagement, collaboration and community had high scores. In contrast, the dimension simplicity was less satisfactory. Four design patterns for social CI could be extracted based on the strong points of the evaluation: social selection, individual/collective box, real-time engagement and collaborative enhancement. The low score on simplicity will be investigated further, but indicates how crucial it is for social features to be intuitive in order to avoid making the overall solution too complex.