If you’re not receiving your free monthly publication from the Society of Competitive Intelligence, go on their Web site and subscribe right away. There is always some useful information coming from them. For example, in the March/April Edition, they summarize a panel discussion on the future of competitive intelligence. Since I’m always surprised to fins that this role is too often neglected in companies, here are some of the highlights mentionned by the specialists :
Market conditions demanding more competitive intelligence :
- Increased costs mean companies need to keep a closer look on what their competitors are doing;
- Recession times force everybody to become more productive ans strategic;
- Emerging economies introduce new, low-cost entrants, competitors;
- New technologies and Web tools create opportunities to track competitor actions.
How will competitive intelligence evolve :
- Competitive intelligence will need to be both local and international;
- Its focus will habe to include market dynamics and trends as well as customer needs ans expectations;
- Competitive intelligence reporting needs to be more strategic to highlight the risks in a manner high management will quickly grasp … and more practical to stimulate action at the customer facing level;
- Competitive intelligence must play an integration role and connect the many parts of the organization linked to market forces;
- It can also be an important change agent in the organization, showing how things are done elsewhere;
- Competitive intelligence must be more proactive than reactive.
Succes factors :
- Introduce new techniques for information gathering, think outside the box and be open to creative strategies;
- Effective communication of the findings is key, present them in offensive/defensive perspectives or in a way your colleagues can translate in actions;
- High management absolutely must understand the strategic importance of competitive intelligence, invest in this function and pay serious attention to its findings;
- Train the competitive intelligence agents properly
Being in charge of competitive intelligenc ewhere I work, I’m obviously sold on the idea that the role must become more strategic. I can only agree that a paradigm shift is needed. But I must say we can start by closely looking at how we translate information in strategic customer knowledge. Let’s face it, our colleagues are swamped in information, they receive way too many emails. That’s why I’m always looking for new and improved ways of producing knowledge, which is different than information, and communicating in a user friendly fashion.
Excellent post. The success factors you mention are right on… particularly the first point regarding taking advantage of the latest tools and techniques for CI information gathering — which could be extended to include using the latest tools for on-going CI information analysis, monitoring and alerting, as well.
In discussing CI with our clients, I often make the point that in the past it was difficult and expensive to find the competitive intelligence that you needed. However, today it is often difficult to cope with all of the competitive intelligence you can find! Taking advantage of cost-effective automated tools to help search, filter, categorize and report on this wealth of rapidly changing open-source competitive intelligence information can go a long way towards managing the real-time input needed to pro-actively leverage CI information in improving company strategy and competitiveness.
Thanks again for an interesting post.
Daryl Scott, Attaain Inc.
AttaainCI – Active Intelligence for Strategic Advantage
http://www.attaain.com
And what might that paradigm shift look like, for the CI function to become more strategic?
My suggestion may appear radical to some, yet it is as straightforward and logical as could be:
The CI function should mirror and support corporate planning activities.
The CI function, should, therefore, collect and analyze information by SBU and by shared horizontal units (like Sales, Marketing & IT) to facilitate their decision-making processes.
To those familiar with Michael E. Porter’s books over the past 28 years, the above is actually the gold standard, although relatively few companies plan correctly at the true industry level, as contrasted with today’s more frequent planning at the industry sector and/or organizational department level.
Cheers,
Alan S. Michaels, co-founder of http://www.e-Competitors.com