Ethics

Business Intelligence is a far from easy profession. People with information have to be approached and encouraged to talk if they are to pass on their high added-value inputs. Everyday we are faced with problems of acceptable rules of professional conduct and the dictates of our own conscience.

Rules of professional behaviour are extremely hard to define. At Egideria we operate as follows:

We abide by the code of professional conduct of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
We wish our consultants to feel really at home and proud of their work. Our group discussions are the key to assessing and finding solutions for any contentious situation. The consultant has total freedom of choice. He can reject any approach which makes him uncomfortable. He is not pressurised.
We are constantly trying out new approaches in the quest for innovation and we take a joint decision not to put any we consider dangerous into practice.

We offer the “bible” below as support and reassurance for our customers and colleagues in their Business Intelligence initiatives. Feel free to use it, even for professional and fee-earning purposes, on condition only that Egideria is named as the author.

Bible of Business Intelligence Ethics

	Contentious situation	Don’ts	Dos
1.	Passing yourself off as someone else.	Use a supplier or customer badge to suck information out of a competitor during a congress.	Display your badge clearly and do not hesitate to tap friendly customers and suppliers for information. Do not hesitate to make contact with competitors.
2.	Stealing documents.	Steal documents or a briefcase from a competitor’s stand.	Wait for the exhibition to end, then do the rounds of vacated stands.
3.	A family member (spouse, for example) working for the competition..	Tell each other everything.	Set clear game rules as to what you can and cannot say. Discuss these game rules with your colleagues and your immediate supervisor.
4.	Asking a job applicant indiscreet questions.	Promise him a job under false pretences.	Put your cards on the table. If you do not want to hire him, tell him clearly that there is no job for him, but that you would like to discuss the market and competitor situation with him.
5.	A new recruit joins the company with documents from his former employer.	Circulate them internally.	Read them and check if they can serve a genuinely useful purpose. If not, return them to the competitor saying that they came to you by accident, or destroy them.
6.	A competitor’s employee is so incapable of holding his tongue that it could compromise his career.	Name him in a widely-circulated report.	Mention the type of source in the report, but not the name of the person (word of mouth only).
7.	Playing on an informer’s divided loyalties (racial, ethnic, sexual, philosophical, political collusion, etc.).	Systematically target members of certain minority groups for interviews.	Be aware of the divided-loyalty phenomenon and define clear game rules in your business.
8.	Recording conversations.	Use them to compromise individuals and force them to talk.	Use the recordings as a back-up for written note taking. Destroy them once the report is written. Familiarise yourself with local regulations in force on recordings made without the knowledge of the person being interviewed.
9.	A competitor employee is known to be cheating on his/her spouse.	Blackmail him/her.	Do not put it in writing.
10.	Seeking personal information about an individual.	Desist from seeking personal information. Store such information in a database.	Comply with rules laid down by the Data Protection Authority. Do not refrain from creating psychological profiles of competitor decision-makers.
11.	Using intermediaries and informers.	Expect them to break the law or rules of professional conduct in their work.	Require suppliers to sign a good practices clause. Ask the supplier to do the same with his own suppliers.
12.	Monitoring staff e-mails.	Do it unobtrusively.	Abide by the law. Warn employees that the company reserves the right to do this. Introduce automatic warning systems. Carry out spot checks. Do not hold back from analysing content flows statistically.