Social competitive intelligence: socio-technical themes and values for the networking organization

This article introduces the notion of social competitive intelligence, meaning competitive intelligence (CI) for the networking organization. A novel socio-technical framework called the Social CI Framework (SCIF) is presented, intended for analysis and design of social CI processes, methods and tools. By using a socio-technical perspective, both social and technical aspects are considered together in SCIF. The framework is founded on a theory related to enterprise 2.0 and wikinomics, and is intended to be used to study social CI using principles such as openness, participation, sharing and co-creation. The presented results are based on a literature review and an exploratory study with interviews of CI experts from Swedish organizations. SCIF explicitly distinguishes between task-oriented models and collaboration models, and models of different socio-technical perspectives. Moreover, SCIF uses the mechanisms of socio-technical themes and a socio-technical value map that relate the theoretical and empirical characteristics with the SCIF modeling method.