Marketing Tech: Getting to Insights and Acting on Them: That's All That Matters

The short answer is “no.” Intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing information about products, clients, competitors, and any aspect of the business needed to support executives and managers who are making strategic decisions for an organization. In the law firm context, we monitor news, litigation, trends, social media and a plethora of other sources to derive that intelligence. What we call it is irrelevant, the only relevant question is whether the recipient derives value and gleans insight from it.

Fundamentally, getting to value and insight comes down to adhering to one simple rule and asking two operative questions: The information must be actionable. Will it change behavior and thought processes? Will it create action? That action need not be immediate, as not all intelligence or information needs to have that attribute to be of value. It is helpful to think about information as either: 1), helping the recipient to gain understanding, and as a result, evaluate a further action at a later date; or 2) something that this group or individual will care about now. Whatever form of knowledge you are seeking to share, the thrust of information's value still hinges on the question, “Is this an insight that will benefit me or a group (client team, industry team, practice team, etc.) today, tomorrow or in the near future?” If you can answer that question accurately, then you will have successfully turned information into knowledge or intelligence.