Balancing Internal Differences in Competitive Intelligence Development and Educational / Experience Status
Overwhelming the less advanced intelligence stakeholders or the colleagues with heavy capacity constraints can be as dangerous as lacking speed and progress potential and challenge to dedicated staff.
When establishing a new market & competitive intelligence function for an organization chances are that there are different types of evolutions and familiarity with the topics of competitive intelligence in that organization already.
While some newcomers or departments with heavy capacity issues might want to take it step by step and slowly only, there might be groups or individuals who want to drive the effort way further, much quicker.
In order to avoid the risk of imbalances ruling the progress and success to implement a market & competitive intelligence function that reaches much deeper than just consuming off-the-shelf market studies with advanced analysis capabilities, it might be wise to carefully involve the more advanced colleagues in the overall educational process. This should be done right from the start and this concern should be pro-actively addressed with them.
If you’d imagine a marketing or sales manager who was asked to free up some capacity from doing business in favor of the new competitive intelligence function you’d know how fragile his support might be. Moreover, if some other department’s market analyst would talk to him enthusiastically about all the great stuff one could do if you’d only had a lot of expertise and people on hand do release all sorts of fancy reports and graphs, there would be an understandable reason to believe that marketing manager might shy away from so many new learnings, exposure, learning curves and finally energy that seems to be required.
Understandable too: the expert wants other colleagues to follow her/his successes, even if (s)he overwhelms inexperienced newbie’s to the competitive intelligence disciplines. Not recognizing the risk of throwing other colleagues off or even scare them a bit they’d sell with flying colors how simple SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces of the competitive environment and a competition PEST analysis look like compared to a full blown 18 months rolling census data based raw material import trend report that incorporates seasonality and raw geo-political impacts.
In order to avoid both: scaring away newcomers and grant them a stepwise adjustment over time and - at the same time – allow the seasoned intelligence expert to perform and offer full support to the organization it might be best involving the specialist honestly and seriously to counter above described risks and help getting the intelligence program off the ground.
Workshops and promotion, management discussions and meetings could be lead by these intelligence experts who might present real world examples to proof success of applied intelligence tools they have developed, deployed or both. They’d have to understand the full breadth of the various knowledge levels and it has to be accepted for various business units to develop their skills according to their real current needs and capacity available.
It can be extremely frustrating to learn that one department has decided not to follow suit because they can’t afford the dedication and energy demonstrated by others. Equaling uneven stakeholder’s capabilities should be done as a team effort and always by proving success through example.
The established experts can help a great deal in this regard, especially because of the much higher impact of proven in-house successes and examples. Make use of this gift and don’t take the risk for it to turn against other stakeholders.
Author: Jens Thieme
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