Intelligence in Regulation

This book is designed to fill the void in international literature on regulation. The wide and largely disparate world of regulators is late to the idea of professionalising decision-making. Such a need is well-understood and ingrained in national security and, to a lesser extent, law enforcement. The late emergence is somewhat surprising given the extent of public harm arising from within highly regulated sectors far exceeds harm in national security and policing.

The book is written from a practitioner’s perspective. The narrative leads the reader through the barriers to effective regulatory decision-making, then to case studies of regulatory failure, and ends up with practical guidance on building and improving intelligence systems.

While oriented towards compliance and regulation, the content can be applied across many other public and private sectors (especially where consideration of external change agents is important in decision-making). If in doubt, simply insert the name of your organisation or field where you read the word ‘regulator’ and you may be surprised how many of the observations echo into your own organisational circumstance!

This book draws largely from the experience of the author as a former intelligence officer, as a builder of intelligence and decision-systems across many sectors, and as a user of intelligence in leading regulatory operations. Theoretical references are drawn from a number of sources and, in particular, the book acts as a companion piece to Managing Intelligence (Quarmby and Young, 2010) which contains the fundamentals of contemporary intelligence craft.