Future of CI

I have watched CI evolve for about 20 years. My crystal ball has many cracks in it, but here is what I see coming:

1) Specialist CI folks will continue to disappear. They will likely be replaced by multi-functional groups, networks which bring an entire organizations elements/members/their suppliers/customers to all focus in niches of understanding CI closely related to their own areas of expertise (innovation, PR/marketing, financial modeling/tracking, etc.). CI will be much more presumed, foundational and ongoing to everything the enterprise does. CI will be one training module or experience more employees/1099's will have earlier in their careers and maybe integrated within shared frameworks and tools needed to also understand customers, consumers and the external environment beyond competition. This will be built on organizational/industry best practices known at the time. Powerful aggregators and arrangers of data are also acclerating the elimination of many task done more manually by CI practitioners in the past (e.g. in Pharma)

2) It will be more important to know WHAT IS HAPPENING vs. WHAT MAY or WILL HAPPEN. There will likely be less time for foresight. CI problem solving will increasingly rely on large personal networks. In the pre Web era, information was always already obsolete once written down. With so many more democratic tools for sharing information/knowledge/opinion, this means instant communication and requires anyone making pretenses at being a CI professional to have the best networks and ways to monitor them and mange the six degrees of separation etc. People will always know before pubs/media of any kind. Now you can stay connected to them more easily.

3) Counterintel will have a much bigger challenge in corraling the loose lips, tweets, etc. in a faster moving world where people are also constantly changing jobs and alliances and in a world where anyone can talk to anyone - and does.

Thoughts?

Stan Dyck