17 CI Product Line: A Tool for Enhancing User Acceptance of CI Mohinder Dugal, PhD Fairleigh Dickinson University A primary duty of competitive intelligence (CI) man- agers is to educate internal clients (users of CI) on what CI can do for them, what it cannot do, and how best to use it. The traditional (and most common) way in which CI managers do this is by listing activities that the CI de- partment can perform for its clients. Such a list may in- clude, for example, activities such as benchmarking, competitor profiling, and five-forces analysis. Case stud- ies that highlight such activities have been published re- cently (see, for example, Ransley, 1996; Stedman, 1996; Vezmar, 1996). However, from the perspective of users, an overview of a CI product line is probably the best way to understand what support is available. In this article, I discuss a generic CI product line that can be used to convey the capabilities of CI departments to internal clients. The products in the product line are significantly unique in terms of their generation and applicability. They differ from one another in terms of their shelf life (short, medium, or long), type of audiences for which they are most useful (middle level, upper level, or specific func- tional area managers), CI processes (collection, analysis, Competitive Intelligence Review, Vol. 9(2) 17–25 (1998) © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 1058-0247/98/02017-09 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A competitive intelligence “product line” is useful for conveying the capabilities of CI departments to internal clients by illustrating the variety of intelligence products that are available. The author brings together a set of products that form a portfolio of CI outputs for a firm, discussing, in detail, the differences among: (1) current intelligence, (2) basic intelligence, (3) technical intelligence, (4) early warning intelligence, (5) estimated intelligence, (6) work group intelligence, (7) targeted intelligence, (8) crisis intelligence, (9) foreign intelligence, and (10) counterintelligence. These CI “products” are distinct from one another in terms of “shelf life,” audience, processes, sources, analytical tools, modes of dissemination, and costs. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.