Business Intelligence Benefits From Tech Advances
Understanding the Competition Starts With Information
BY GARY DIMAS
Special to the Business Journal
Motorola, in 1983, instituted a systematic corporate business intelligence unit in an effort to become less reactive to market forces. The purpose was simple: provide an over-the-horizon view of external events that would shape the way the company conducted its business.
Motorola, a pioneer in implementing a government-influenced strategy of intelligence, would now be proactive in its decision-making process.
How important is competitive intelligence today? The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) estimates that 82 percent of companies with annual revenues over $10 billion have an organized system for collecting information on rivals. Even smaller firms see the value , 60 percent of all surveyed U.S. companies had an organized intelligence system.
Firms today have two discrete sets of management tools available: internal and external. The analogy in competitive intelligence is made to an aircraft , gauges in the cockpit tell the pilot the condition of the aircraft (internal business controls), while radar tells the pilot what he cannot see with his own eyes as he travels at a high rate of speed (external factors). Corporate intelligence acts like a radar system to provide key decision makers with early warnings of their competitor’s moves.
Establish Budget,
Intelligence Priorities
If you haven’t given this topic much thought, this article can serve as the basis for implementing an effective competitive intelligence strategy.
What’s needed?
Companies that address the need for intelligence and devote significant resources to this end generate the best and broadest range of intelligence. It’s likely you’re on a budget, so your challenge is to maximize your investment in intelligence.
In order to work within a limited budget, and provide timely and critical market information, you must adopt a top-down intelligence strategy. This form of intelligence system requires researchers , those in the trenches gathering information , to ask key decision makers questions prior to gathering information including: “What is the end goal?” and “What decisions are you trying to make?”
By understanding the scope of the query, analysts can narrow the focus of the research and seek only critical information. It’s imperative that management narrows the field of focus by providing key intelligence requirements.
One of the obvious challenges in intelligence is to add some form of automation to the process. The ideal situation provides for a system that searches the Internet for key profiles, compiles information, extracts key intelligence and enters this data into spreadsheets. This scenario depicts the ultimate push strategy, where information is pushed down to intelligence analysts and key decision makers.
Despite claims by information providers for fully automated online market research, it’s often been the experience (based on discussions with programmers, software engineers and corporate intelligence professionals) that the process of transforming information into intelligence is a human function, not a software function.
Creating Effective
Intelligence Searches
Still, there are a number of options that can reduce the human resource requirements. These techniques include the creation of intelligence profiles for each target competitor; deployment of “smart” Internet search algorithms to collect and deliver data; and delegation of certain find and fetch and data entry tasks to an administrative level.
Corporate intelligence managers suggest that effective programs usually were the result of an evolutionary process. Programs often grew out of the realization that useful intelligence was being gathered as a matter of course from competitors, customers, vendors and employees, and that formal structuring of this asset would serve to redirect the intelligence back to executives for use in the decision making process.
The steps needed to improve the process by converting it from a pull strategy to a push strategy include: a custom-developed or subscription-type Web search and content management tool; well-defined corporate profiles; and significant improvements in intelligence delivery.
A number of tools are on the market today; from simple desktop software browsers to search/content subscription packages to comprehensive market research reporting. In some cases, trial software versions are available as free downloads for evaluation purposes. Check out the following:
– Spyonit.com , allows you to create a personalized home page that lists the “spies” you have selected to use as your own. These selected spies are ones that notify you when the sites they monitor have changed. Free to user.
– ProFusion.com , Electric Library premium content subscription , comprehensive simultaneous Internet search. Subscription price of $59.95 per year.
– Clickgarden , Off-the-shelf software that resides as a custom desktop browser. The user captures Web pages from multisearch engines that can be annotated, highlighted, stored (even when the original page no longer exists), organized into categories and shared. Software price of $170.
– Northern Light , Beyond a limited number of free features, the basic monthly fee-based account provides powerful search capability from an indexed Web, plus a database of 7,000 text-based sources. Price of approximately $1,000 per month.
Last, some tips. Follow Web links , they often indicate when money is changing hands. When money changes hands, so does information.
Research all parties that have relationships with your competitors. Pursue anomalies. Thoroughly read all important documents. A single search can identify clients of, as well as vendors to, a competitor.
And finally, always verify everything found on the Internet with other trusted sources.
Dimas is a strategic marketing analyst at Carlsbad-based BrightCom Technologies, Inc.
