Per il Glossario il ciclo dell’intelligence è:

Termine che descrive il complesso delle fasi in cui si articola l’attività di informazione per la sicurezza, dalle indicazioni delle Autorità di governo fino alla disseminazione di prodotti intelligence ai fruitori istituzionali, passando per pianificazione informativa, ricerca informativa ed elaborazione.
Generalmente non inclusa nelle rappresentazioni grafiche del ciclo intelligence, ma di grande rilevanza, la fase di feedback in cui si valuta in che misura i prodotti intelligence abbiano soddisfatto le esigenze conoscitive delle Autorità di governo e degli altri interlocutori istituzionali in materia di sicurezza nazionale e si determina se, su una specifica situazione o fenomeno, siano necessarie ulteriori attività di ricerca ed elaborazione. L’esigenza di col mare eventuali lacune conoscitive riavviando la fase della ricerca informativa può essere segnalata anche dagli analisti, e dunque prima che il ciclo intelligence, nella sua forma astratta, sia stato completato.

Nel testo “Words of Intelligence” l’intelligence cycle viene definito:

The five-step of tasking, collecting, processing, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence. The intelligence cycle drives the day-to-day activities of the intelligence community (IC). It starts with the needs intelligence ‘consumers’ – that is, policymakers, military officials, and other decision makers who need intelligence information in conducting their duties and responsibilities.
These needs – also referred to as intelligence requirements – are sorted and prioritized within the IC and drive the collection activities of the members of the IC. Once information has been collected, it is processed, initially evaluated, and reported to both consumers and ‘all-source’ intelligence analysts at agencies like the CIA, DIA, and State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research. All-source analysts are responsible for performing a more thorough evaluation and assessment of the collected information by integrating the data obtained from a variety of collection agencies and sources, both classified and unclassified.
This assessment leads to a finished intelligence report being disseminated to the consumer. The ‘feedback’ part of the cycle assesses the degree to wich the finished intelligence addresses the needs of the intelligence consumer and will determine if further collection and analysis is required.
The FBI uses a six-step intelligence cycle. The FBI intelligence cycle includes requirements (identified, information needs), planning and direction (management of the entire effort, from identifying the need for information to delivering an intelligence product to a consumer), collection (the gathering of raw information based on requirements), and processing and exploitation (converting the vast amount of information collected into a form usable by analysts). This is done through a variety of methods including decryption, language translations, and data reduction. Analysis and production is the conversion of raw information into intelligence. It includes integrating, evaluating, and analyzing available data, and preparing intelligence products. Dissemination , the last step, is the distribution of raw or finished intelligence to the consumers whose needs initiated the intelligence requirements […]