Corporate Intelligence is often also referred to as "competitive intelligence". A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analysing, and distributing information about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organisation. Key points of these definitions: Competitive Intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice, as opposed to industrial espionage which is illegal. The focus is on the external business environment.

There is a process involved in gathering information, converting it into intelligence and then utilising this in business decision making. CI professionals emphasise that if the intelligence gathered is not usable (or actionable) then it is not intelligence. A more focused definition of CI regards it as the organisational function responsible for the early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious. Experts also call this process the early signal analysis.

This definition focuses attention on the difference between dissemination of widely available factual information (such as market statistics, financial reports, newspaper clippings) performed by functions such as libraries and information centres, and competitive intelligence which is a perspective on developments and events aimed at yielding a competitive edge. The term CI is often viewed as synonymous with Competitor analysis but Competitive Intelligence is more than analysing competitors. It is about making the organisation more competitive relative to its entire environment and stakeholders, customers, competitors, distributors, technologies, macro-economic data etc.

FRAP (Facilitated Risk Analysis Process) is often used in analysing risk in corporate settings. FRAP analyses one system, application or segment of business processes at time. FRAP assumes that additional efforts to develop precisely quantified risks are not cost effective because: such estimates are time consuming risk documentation becomes too voluminous for practical use specific loss estimates are generally not needed to determine if controls are needed. After identifying and categorising risks, a team identifies the controls that could mitigate the risk.

The decision for what controls are needed lies with the business manager. The team's conclusions as to what risks exist and what controls needed are documented along with a related action plan for control implementation. Three of the most important risks a software company faces are unexpected changes in revenue and costs from those budgeted and amount of specialisation of the software planned. Risks that affect revenues can be unanticipated competition, privacy, intellectual property right problems, and unit sales that are less than forecast; unexpected development costs also create risk that can be in the form of more rework than anticipated, security holes, and privacy invasions.

Narrow specialisation of software with a large amount of research and development expenditures can lead both business and technological risks since specialisation does not lead to lower unit costs of software. Combined with the decrease in the potential customer base, specialisation risk can be significant for a software firm. After probabilities of scenarios have been calculated with risk analysis, the process of risk management can be applied to help manage the risk. Methods like Applied Information Economics add to and improve on risk analysis methods by introducing procedures to adjust subjective probabilities, compute the value of additional information and to use the results in part of a larger portfolio management problem.

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