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Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Association Leadership Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Paul Santilli, who is the CEO with Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals, SCIP. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Santilli : Thank you Lee. Pleasure to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Before we get too far into things, tell us about SCIP. How you serving folks?

Paul Santilli : So SCIP, Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals. We are the world’s largest global intelligence association. We’re a nonprofit community. We have over 25,000 individuals in 120 countries. And our mission is really to promote, develop, share knowledge around data, the use of data, and how data can be transformed into intelligence and insights that can be used to build organizational growth, improve personal development, improve societal issues and things of that nature. So we are an institution that has a lot of thought leadership, that provides that sort of value and content to a greater population.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea? How did this come about?

Paul Santilli : Actually, SCIP’s been around for many years, over 30 years as a nonprofit, and it’s been traditionally in what we call the competitive intelligence platform footprint. Really looking at what are your competitors doing, how are they performing, what are their customers and products and pricing and marketing strategies and all those kinds of things, and use that information then to develop your own competitive positioning and how you can compete better in the marketplace and, and hopefully get your products to sell and gather market share and so forth. Over the last few years, I’ve taken leadership of SCIP. I’ve been affiliated with SCIP for a long time on the board of directors and so forth. But now, as a leadership position with SCIP, I’ve realized the importance of the fact that you have to really go beyond just the competitive intelligence landscape that is forever critical, absolutely critical in any intelligence modeling effort, but we want to build off of that to include other data driven intelligence disciplines, such as economic intelligence and social intelligence and human intelligence, and all the other types of applications anywhere there’s data generated. For example, the electric car gets anywhere from generates anywhere from 4 to 20GB worth of content, terabytes, I should say, of content every day. Now that data that’s being used there is being used by many, many different people downstream. A lot of the advertisers and the manufacturers of the tires and and all of these sorts of things in terms of how they use that data to create a strategy to promote certain elements in your lifestyle, or to promote a business development plan or whatever the case might be. So this use of data is critical and very important for all individuals to really understand how to use that data to create a strategy that can help you and your organization grow.

Lee Kantor: Well, I think your associations more and more important, especially in an age we’re living in now with the with AI and large language models and machine learning, it seems like what you’re doing goes hand in hand with that effort.

Paul Santilli : Yeah, absolutely. See, the the intent here is, I think what’s happened over the last few years, especially with Covid, has really come to make organizations and individuals realize the importance of data. You know, the use of data to digitally transform. You might have used that. Heard that term used before in the industry. Digitally transform your organization to be one by which they use the data to be able to understand customer behaviors. Using data to improve your infrastructure. Using data to improve how you market and price and position your products in the marketplace. And Covid, a lot of organizations because of all the restrictions that were put on on companies and individuals. Many companies failed because they didn’t have this data centric mentality in the organization. Now, from the learnings from that, we’re able to to have a pretty comprehensive understanding of how data can get you into this digitally transformed, 21st century type of a company that is so crucial to be able to compete in today’s world.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you find that we’re getting to the point where so much data is being, um, captured that without a strategy on how to learn from it, it’s kind of you’re just doing something. It sounds like you should be doing. But if you’re not kind of learning from it or connecting dots from it, it’s kind of a silly pursuit, right? Like, if you’re not able to do anything with it, then why are you doing it?

Paul Santilli : Absolutely. And that’s the whole crux of what SCIP is all about. We help individuals understand the fact that the data is there, you can collect it, but it’s how you analyze it and how you use it in order to make it a growth enabler for you and your organization. And you mentioned AI earlier. Um, you know, interestingly, AI has been around for at least 50 years. I took an AI course in college 100 years ago. So that tells you how old this AI has been around, right? The reason why it’s really taken off over the last few years is because of two things. One, the fact that we have the data because we didn’t have the data enough for the models to learn from, and B we have compute power, the compute technology, in order to run these algorithms, you know, very effectively and quickly. So with that now in play, you’re able to have these AI algorithms as as tools in your toolbox to analyze the data, to come up with behaviors and experiences and hopefully get to a point where you can project future situations. We call this scenario planning or futures planning, and understand what the future may hold for a different organization. You know, doing extrapolations and in roadmaps and technology trends, and vertical market trends and things of this nature, and then come up after that, really a prescription of how the organization needs to behave in order to respond to this sort of scenario that’s been painted by AI.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you help or advise people to kind of separate signal from noise and to know what are the metrics that matter? Because there’s so much data, it might be easy to see something, but it may not be the thing that really matters. Like just because you can capture something easily or you can count it doesn’t mean that it’s, you know, worth counting. Like, how do you is that an area that you help your members with?

Paul Santilli : Well, without a doubt. I mean, it’s, you know, I call it trying to extract the golden nuggets of information from that vast population of noise out there. And if you look at different sources, I mean, social sources, for example, has a tremendous amount of noise. But there are golden nuggets you can extract around customer sentiment and behaviors and things of that nature, uh, structured data that comes out of, um, you know, corporate environments or, or public domain content. There’s always information to pull from that. And again, the tools you use and the way you’re able to interpret the content that these tools generate the content from are really the way that you need to do that. And the key to this is employing not only the technology around AI and all the other sophisticated knowledge management tools out there, but it’s also the human intelligence element that’s a very critical component to help eliminate bias and help eliminate hallucinations in your AI algorithm and help eliminate, you know, the the the trends that are strictly data centric when in fact society has accepted a different perspective. They may not be representative of the factual data that comes out of out of the AI information. Many times in history, we have instances where the societal acceptance of a perspective is what dictates the future trends, and that may not be based on the actual data that comes out of the research. So you have to be able to differentiate and know which one do you want to use as the data source for your strategy and growth? Uh, opportunity for you and your company now?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s so important to have this knowledge and the ability to think critically about all of this because it’s it’s permeating every aspect of our, our world right now. And if you don’t like if we can’t agree on certain things as facts, it’s hard to have conversations about data. And, um, and the importance of it and what’s true and what’s not true and what’s a hallucination? What’s not a hallucination? If we can’t all agree with this, it gets really challenging.

Paul Santilli : And it’s that’s, you know, that’s a whole nother podcast episode that’s probably at least two hours long, to be honest with you, Lee. Uh, I talk in this topic quite often, and, uh, it is certainly a challenge to, uh, What I like to call the the intelligence professionals out there. Um, this expanded perspective of using data around all types of things that are intelligence based. You know, competitive, as I mentioned, with all the other types of intelligence, even intelligence and sustainability and social responsibility. This is something that SCIP is active upon and using and educating individuals and organizations how to use your data and intelligence to create what we like to call, uh, a consortium for the betterment of people and planet. How do you use this data to to improve your infrastructure, to improve societal, uh, challenges and behaviors and things like that? And the, the, the aspect around SCIP is really these individuals who understand the need of intelligence. And also SCIP is comprised of experts in the field, people who understand and have the tools to be able to analyze this. So we are a consortium of this intelligence, thought leadership and intelligence subject matter experts that are able to educate and train and show people how to use data in order to create this better environment we’re trying to get to.

Lee Kantor: Now, under your leadership, you mentioned you’ve kind of, um, made the tent larger, maybe, and or including people in other areas in other industries that maybe weren’t first part of this.

Paul Santilli : That’s absolutely yes. We call this expanded perspective. What I like to call the intelligence ecosystem. It’s really that expansion of all things generated from data. And so this again applies to many different applications. But we’ve not only expanded the reach of where data can take us and intelligence can take us, but we’ve also expanded ourselves significantly in the global sense. And what I mean by that, we’ve expanded our major events that we have around around the world. We used to be primarily North American focused. We’re now in Europe, Asia, Africa, um, putting one in South America, uh, Japan, so forth and so on. So we’ve expanded our international conferences, but we’ve also put together what I, what I call these intelligence centers of excellence, iQOS. These are regional communities that are extensions of Skype that reside all over the globe to talk about the regional data and intelligence needs and challenges. How does the intelligence and data management and the maturity of the intelligence model exist over in Africa versus Indonesia versus, you know, Romania versus Silicon Valley? And as you can imagine, the maturity levels between those areas are going to be very, very different. So it’s not a one size fits all in the intelligence business. The the having these intelligence centers of excellence all over the globe allows us to get a footprint of how the intelligence model behaves in these other regions so that we collect the information from all these regions. And now we can disseminate best practices to everybody so that everyone can get up to speed, and the learning curve becomes that much faster for those organizations and countries that have a very low maturity model, for example.

Lee Kantor: Now, since doing this effort and expanding the participants as well as the reach, have you had those kind of serendipitous connecting the dots that maybe no one had connected because there hadn’t been that many disparate individuals doing, you know, disparate things all in one place now, but now they have kind of a, a common playbook that maybe they can all, you know, there’s now a more common language that you’re you’re connecting the dots between people that maybe hadn’t really maybe they had been siloed previously.

Paul Santilli : Yeah. So I referenced these intelligence centers of excellence. We started this a little over a year ago. Uh, we we kicked it off with eight locations around the globe. We currently have 22, and we’re going to probably have 30 or so in the next 3 to 4 months. That’s how much traction we’re getting in the international community. So these are areas that are hearing what we propose and what we want to do and are in dire need of being able to understand the value of data in today’s environment, especially around, you know, countries around Africa, countries of Southeast Asia. These are emerging markets that really need to have a better understanding of how to use data. Now we coupled that also with what we call our affiliate program. Now our affiliates are partnerships with other international and local um intelligence organizations that have a similar but different sort of intelligence mission and focus. For example, there’s there’s um, several of them in Africa we’ve dealt with where we only US based, um, intelligence organization that has partnered on a, on a grand scale with a number of different African intelligence communities. We have intelligence relationships and affiliates with several different universities around the world who are helping us develop our educational content that we put together. Um, so these affiliates have, have are starting to fill in the gaps in the overall intelligence ecosystem model that I painted and are really helping us to become much more broad in our intelligence applications. As I mentioned from this, uh, data centric perspective that I painted.

Lee Kantor: Now, I would imagine that in certain places they’re just hungry for this type of interaction and this type of education and this type of sharing. It must be so rewarding to be able to give these people a place to go and a community to become part of where where everybody is kind of talking the same language and really passionate about the same, uh, things.

Paul Santilli : It’s without a doubt. And, you know, there’s one thing to build an organization, but to do it for the right reasons and to have a, a, a, a, um, global impact, uh, and have an impact on societal behaviors and organizational behaviors. And underdeveloped countries like we’re working now with Africa, uh, is truly rewarding. And I think that’s the real value you get from this. It’s not only the, you know, the ability to create a strategy for your business grows better and you make more money and so forth. But it’s also to help those organizations that are underdeveloped in infrastructure, you know, helping them use data to understand, you know, what is needed to put sanitation systems or water water cleanliness system or help to, you know, eliminate, uh, the destruction of native native habitat and so forth and so on. These are very rewarding things that are part of the model to use data and intelligence, as I say, for the betterment of people and planet. So it is very, very rewarding in that sense.

Lee Kantor: So who should become a member? Who are the people that you want in this ecosystem? And you mentioned a variety of groups and industries and and organizations. But who should consider being becoming a member of SIP?

Paul Santilli : Yeah. So the beauty of this is, you know, the question to ask is what individuals or who are the individuals that use data to make informed decisions and to create intelligence to make informed decisions in the workplace or even in their individual personal lifestyle or whatever. And it’s hard to say hard to find somebody who doesn’t or shouldn’t use data. And that’s the whole context here is the fact that, you know, we call these I call these people intelligence professionals. Well, they’re more of people who can understand the value of data and how to use that not only to you can grow your your organization, but to provide a skill set for yourself as an individual, to be more knowledgeable and better equipped with tools and the way you look at data and analyze information, the logic applied and the intelligence you can derive from that, and how to implement and take action on these things to make a change rather than, you know, sitting on your hands and kind of waiting for everyone else to do it. So the door is open. We have a very broad membership community portfolio you can join for free and be on the receiving end of a lot of very valuable content, or for a nominal fee. Every year you can get access to literally thousands of pieces of assets webinars, papers, podcasts, all different kinds of things we generate that can be used as, um, content to equip you with the knowledge that you need. Plus the training. We offer very broad education program and access to workshops and webinars and and all kinds of things in that space to get you more equipped. As you know, again, it’s adding the tools in your toolbox and increasing your brand as an individual with the intelligence knowledge that will help you, uh, be better in industry and in life in general.

Lee Kantor: So in a given business, um, who is typically the like, what’s the title of the person who is the member in an organization?

Paul Santilli : Well, it could be anywhere from a data analyst. Uh, there’s, there’s people who are in the competitive intelligence role in different industries, but it can also be folks in marketing and sales and product development and strategy. You can have mid-level and upper level management who are looking at supply chains and logistics and, and even all the way up to C-suite. And we have a C-suite program in development right now, um, an advanced Education degree program in intelligence and data management. This is something we’re developing because it’s so important to have the leadership of your organization be data driven and understand the data requirements that organizations must have, that digital transformation mindset that organizations must have in order to to create a culture that uses data within all of its decision making context. And once you have that at the top level, you know, the the trickle down effect within the organization that much more efficient and more usable for other people to then gain that knowledge and make it a priority in their everyday efforts.

Lee Kantor: Now, what about for the young people out there? Uh, is there a career path or a, um, maybe a like what? What would be their major? What would be their, um, kind of the direction they should go in in order to really, uh, learn more and get more involved in data and intelligence.

Paul Santilli : There’s a number of, uh, universities around the world that offer intelligence, uh, career path intelligence curriculum, I should say. Um, one of them we partner with, they’re an affiliate as well as a provider of curriculum for our education program. And I’m going to give a plug here to Mercyhurst University out of Pennsylvania. They’re very much advanced. And one of the world leaders in the intelligence development, business, community development, education and curriculum. So for young people getting into the into this environment and getting into this industry, it’s really you can start it at the, at the education, you know, school level. And then you can take that as a part of SCIP to help you nurture it along within your career all the way through to, you know, senior management type levels of applications. So there’s really a a groundswell, but there’s also an executive swell that’s happening simultaneously. And when you have both of those growing, you know, they’re going to then encompass the entire, you know, Ecosystem of of of the range of people that are affected then by in organizations by this whole data centric perspective.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have any advice for other association leaders that would like to expand the reach and expand the types of members of an organization? That was probably a big lift, and it was probably took some negotiation to even get the board and everybody kind of on the same page of, hey, we used to do this, but now let’s aim higher. Let’s think about this more holistically. Um, can you share some strategies or some ways you were able to kind of get everybody on board with this?

Paul Santilli : Certainly challenges and there’s setbacks, but then there’s, you know, two steps forward, one step back, sometimes three steps back. It depends. But it all begins with a vision. It’s all begins with how you want to paint the world. And once the you know, from a leadership standpoint, when you have the vision, the next part of your your, your responsibility as a leader is to garner the troops around to follow that vision and support them every step of the way to achieve the, you know, not only the trajectory, but to achieve that vision over time and that that involves trust and and support and behaviors. Um, that’s the sort of thing that I, that I think is a critical element for anybody trying to take an existing organization, um, and kind of expand the box or get out of the box to create a different environment. Today’s world is so small, and the data has made it that way, such that if you try to stay within some sort of a niche geographic or product or services niche, I think you’re going to be limiting yourself in terms of the longevity and your ability to compete.

Paul Santilli : Now there’s exceptions, of course, but I’m talking about, you know, the the world being so small, the globalization effort is, is really, I think, where there’s opportunities and that’s happening all around us. Mergers and acquisitions and, and, you know, different perspectives to being taken on from a, an international, um, business relationship standpoint and, and all of the things happening in this context. I think the the ability to bring in partners, you know, the consortium we’re building has grown significantly over the last two years. And I’m very, very excited and happy about that. But to me, this is still scratching the surface. I’m trying to create what’s called what I call intelligence gravity, where as you build more and more of an intelligence consortium, you tend to draw more and more intelligence related entities into your consortium such that you have this gravity effect. And I think organizations in general have to really reach out and try to determine how do they affect this sort of gravity behavior of other organizations to build that sort of consortium model to have an impact, especially in the areas that we’re trying to focus our energies at.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more about SCIP or connect with you, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Paul Santilli : Yeah, obviously LinkedIn profile, you can reach out to me by all means. I’m more than happy to have a have a frank discussion with anybody who’s interested, but our website’s websites. Wwe. Has all the content there you can join for free if you’d like. Or as I say, you can pay a nominal fee and get all the great content, literally thousands of pieces of information and access to a ton of other content that can really help you develop as an individual and also help you develop the tools needed to help your organization grow and be a part of the consortium. So that was how I would recommend reaching out and connecting.

Lee Kantor: Well, Paul, thank you so much for sharing your story today, doing such important work, and we appreciate you.

Paul Santilli : Lee. I appreciate the opportunity. I had a great time and uh, hopefully, uh, you know, we can make a difference out here. So thank you again for the opportunity.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.