Preparation & Development
Before you can even start to establish a market intelligence function or any competitive intelligence systems in any enterprise you want to prepare all single elements of the effort and develop intelligence definitions, basics, techniques, processes and finally systems and applications.
Process development – any gathering of intelligence and passing though the information and data will have to be orchestrated thoroughly in order to be sustainable, reliable and value adding. The intelligence process needs to include cross disciplines and external functions as well as tightly woven networking between intelligence sources and users.
Legal departments, finance, M&A groups should be involved as well as marketing & sales staff. For example you want to know and let everyone else know how information and data is gathered, indexed, retained and delivered, who is responsible for which interfacing section as well as for quality controls and analysis steps.
Staff and supporters training - Who ever has to follow those processes and guidelines and/or is considered user or stakeholder of any intelligence system and tool, these individuals will not know every process step and tool feature by heart to begin with. Initial training and follow-up coaching will have to be set up and conducted. The better all users and interfaces are educated the smoother your intelligence and data flow processes will run and the less the organization has to spend on firefighting, fixing and hand-holding exercises.
Double loop learning - Make sure to introduce and nurture feedback loops that will help both the stakeholder and the managers, administrators and developers of the intelligence systems and processes to improve and grow on future intelligence and application requirements.
Systems development - A strong reporting or functional line to the IT department pays, regardless if you outsource intelligence portal solutions and reports indexing or if you tie in the intelligence effort into internally used CRM systems and the likes. Information technology will enable your entire organization, this would be the worst area to neglect if you want to offer smart and efficient intelligence solutions.
Improvements, fine-tuning - Even the best system needs improvements and upgrades over time as all surrounding variables change all the time. Make sure to build in feedback and bug reporting loops in both the intelligence management process and the intelligence tools. This will alert you frequently on missing features and functionality and any glitch in the process or system.
Author: Jens Thieme
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