Who Are the Customers for Intelligence? by Peter C. Oleson.
From the paper:
Who uses intelligence and why? The short answer is almost everyone and to gain an advantage. While nation-states are most closely identified with intelligence, private corporations and criminal entities also invest in gathering and analyzing information to advance their goals. Thus the intelligence process is a service function, or as Australian intelligence expert Don McDowell describes it,
Information is essential to the intelligence process. Intelligence… is not simply an amalgam of collected information. It is instead the result of taking information relevant to a specific issue and subjecting it to a process of integration, evaluation, and analysis with the specific purpose of projecting future events and actions, and estimating and predicting outcomes.
It is important to note that intelligence is prospective, or future oriented (in contrast to investigations that focus on events that have already occurred).
As intelligence is a service, it follows that it has customers for its products. McDowell differentiates between “clients” and “customers” for intelligence. The former are those who commission an intelligence effort and are the principal recipients of the resulting intelligence product. The latter are those who have an interest in the intelligence product and could use it for their own purposes. Most scholars of intelligence do not make this distinction. However, it can be an important one as there is an implied priority associated with a client over a customer. (footnote markers omitted)
If you want to sell the results of topic maps, that is highly curated data that can be viewed from multiple perspectives, this essay should spark your thinking about potential customers.
You may also find this website useful: Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
I first saw this at Full Text Reports as Who Are the Customers for Intelligence? (draft).