Legal Implications of Gathering Competitive Intelligence

From the world of competitive intelligence, comes this interesting bit
of speculation from the US. It seems that there are concerns
about the legal liability of a firm in relation to any competitive
intelligence activities they undertake. I've been doing some work on CI
lately - in particular looking at using narrative to extract CI held
internally. (One thing that this does is make you a little bit paranoid
about things like blogging - what competitive intelligence might I give
away by talking about competitive intelligence. I can see how major
intelligence agency stuff can become so nutty. )

I've always thought that he really tricky legal implication might be the
'human intelligence' - the stuff you gather from people in the field. To
me, this is where the real wealth is, and where you are going to get the
legally questionable stuff if you undertake work to gather, analyse,
distribute, and act on it. Such an activity carries the inherent risk
that a bit of info gets passed around that really shouldn't have. Of
course, this is nothing new, but the use of narrative techniques to
gather this kind of information means that it is more likely to be
recorded and retrievable - I mean, that's the whole idea. And a
conversation that has been transcribed and stored on a hard drive is
much harder to deny any knowledge of (makes me wish that the briefings
to Howard Government ministers on SIEV-4, children overboard, and AWB to
name a few where undertaken using a narrative approach).

Previously though, I've had less concern around the stuff that's
publicly available because it's publicly available. A lot of the
information isn't overly useful on its own, and requires a lot of
gathering and analysis activity before it becomes intelligence. The
implication now is that the act of knowingly gathering this information
for purposes which are very nearly the antithesis of what it was
provided for - instead of selling a service, the information is being
used to guide a competitor on how to beat them to a sale - could be
illegal under current US laws. That makes a trick area of work just that
little bit trickier.

KM in the News

I came across an article from telegraph.co.uk looking at management fads, and KM got a mention. I was particularly interested in this paragraph:

The general idea of knowledge management is hard to argue with. Few do. It's still broadly in favour. However, many knowledge management schemes put in by different companies have come under attack for being needlessly complex, and for saving too much useless information.

The article places the emphasis on the technology side of KM, while also mentioning that "[s]ome knowledge management is cultural", which places the above paragraph in a neat context. The interest to me here is the perception of KM outside the domain of KM theorists and practitioners, as essentially an IT-driven process.

I'm of the firm opinion that this perception that this article has the idea barse-ackwards, but my opinion doesn't matter. Clearly, more needs to be done to promote the importance of knowledge-sharing culture within organisations, rather than the systems that support it - which are often crucial, but not the deciding factor.

Basically, the best IT system available may have no impact on KM outcomes. Most of the really good KM initiatives I have seen over the years have come not from brining in a new system to solve the problem, but from using existing systems to make cultural changes.

This was well demonstrated at the recent KM Australia conference, with the presentation that impressed me the most over the 2 days - Cheryl Walker's experiences of building k-sharing culture at National Australia Bank. Having worked for 2 of the big 4 banks in Australia in the past 10 years, my regard for the organisation and the way it supported it staff was not good, so I was expecting much. Instead, I was blown away by how much Cheryl was achieving with the small resourcing she had available. No new technology platforms, no major IT investment, but still getting results.

Such experiences are the ones that give me the most hope.