SCIP becomes more strategic
Jinfo Blog

9th August 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

A year after signing its merger agreement with the Frost & Sullivan Institute (see Diana Nutting’s posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20095), SCIP (http://www.scip.org) has agreed to a name change. Rather cleverly, the organisation’s acronym remains the same – only the first word changes from ‘Society’ to ‘Strategic’, turning it into ‘Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals’. This immediately invokes a more inclusive approach. According to CEO Ken Garrison’s blog, the idea behind the change is to reach out to clients as well as to practitioners globally and to emphasise that ‘CI goes beyond competitors’ (http://www.scipblog.org/?p=54). The SCIP trademark and its 25-year old brand identity remains. This all makes sounds sense and in fact reflects what other infopro organisations, such as the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals, http://www.aiip.org), have been stressing all along: information professionals provide intelligence and added value for strategic purposes. Of course, SCIP’s smooth name change transition brings to mind SLA’s similar attempts late last year. (see Tim Buckley-Owen’s posting at the time at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27456). SLA’s board too proposed to introduce ‘strategic’ into a completely new name for the organisation, however the resulting acronym, ASKPro was hardly going to slip easily from people’s tongues. In the event, SLA’s membership, given the choice of only the one new name, despite a lengthy and expensive consultation process, voted overwhelmingly to keep the SLA name. Already, there has been speculation in the information blogosphere as to whether the SCIP name change will attract more SLA members, who may either switch organisations entirely or take on dual membership. No doubt, SLA will be watching developments closely.

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