Recognizing the inconvenient truth
From Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function by the Competitive Intelligence Foundation you can read the entire chapter Harmonizing Competitive Intelligence, by Jens Thieme - Head of Global Market & Competitive Intelligence - here at MarkIntell.com.
For an organization that focuses on many goals in their chosen activities it is difficult to keep a neutral look into efficiency and effectiveness of most routines and standard disciplines. Intelligence is no exception and you might very likely find senior managers in any organization who are convinced that their intelligence is just what they need.
They might not know how much effort was consumed and that they might not deploy state-of-the-art and best practice intelligence techniques and tools. They simply feel well enough informed to back their decisions. This is the group of managers who we needed to convince otherwise. In fact this effort will have to be an ongoing one.
Hint: A proven analogy of intelligence value and its position within the group of intellectual drivers is the association with driving a vehicle in heavy traffic. While the gauges visualize the current state (internal Business Intelligence), the rear view mirror shows where you are coming from (Experience, Knowledge Management), the look out the side windows provides an important snap shot of your external environment (news clippings, media coverage) while the view through the wind shield is similar to your market & competitive intelligence (the forward view). All elements in combination should be processed to take decisions on speed, direction and resources at play.
The other group of managers who we focused our attention on to begin with were the ones who had an understanding about and own experience with some shortcomings in intelligence already or who were even very outspoken about improving our intelligence efforts. This strategy worked very well as we were able to identify very real issues together that we wanted to address with suggestions and ideas to convince the first group (above).
We also understood that there was some part of management that simply didn’t understand what modern CI is all about and what value it can return. Simple information was often used as it was processed intelligence. A lack of context was very apparent here as was a lack of sustained, positive impact. But this was not a group of individuals who was eager or capable of starting to recognize that we had issues. Let alone supporting a major change.
The true issues we did identify with the help of open minded marketers and executives were pretty quickly gathered and presented quite a nice potential for savings and improvements without having to analyze too much. I believe you might recognize a couple of these blind spots within your organization, assuming you kept reading this article for the purpose of learning about similarities in your developing intelligence efforts (see Sidebar 1).
Sidebar 1 – Blind spots in fragmented intelligence operations
- Information disconnect, competing or conflicting data
When sources, approaches and individuals vary no same interpretation or re-utilization is possible. In worst cases results contradict each other.
- Information is mistaken for intelligence
Sub optimal intelligence education and a lack of integrated intelligence work leads people to believe that any market study or raw competitive information actually are the intelligence.
- Hidden effort & wasted capacity
In order to satisfy executive orders for intelligence an unstructured intelligence effort is likely to exhaust massive resources without the knowledge of that executive. Worse even: if there is no clear value creation any intelligence work is just overhead!
- Multiplications & double spend
Intelligence vendors who take advantage of their customers gladly sell the same study twice to two different recipients in different departments or countries. Sometimes two individuals just work on the same intelligence without knowing from one another.
- Island view
Cross departmental intelligence impact is often missed due to island view. Financial, M&A, Legal or Media departments most likely possess crucial intelligence that could add significant value to R&D or M&S intelligence. Let alone capacity efficiency and economy of scale in intelligence purchases.
As mentioned the company’s evolution has left many units independent from each other. Not surprisingly crucial information didn’t find any connection from one business unit to another even if they were synergizing in one way or the other. For example one business unit produces, markets and sells an ingredient chemical compound for a certain end article while another business unit produces, markets and sells a finishing chemical for the very same end market product. Both business units work independently from each other but within same industries and markets so sharing of information about this external competitive environment seems logical.
Only: it hardly happens as marketers (who conduct intelligence work) and sales staffers from both groups never meet. On top of the difficult situation for two sales reps from these two business units to call on the same customer who produces the end article they came equipped with differing sets of intelligence, varying in quality and quantity. Worse even: in one case a finishing chemical used for surface treatment couldn’t unfold its benefits because of the ingredient chemical’s technical and application characteristics. The lack of internal intelligence collaboration enabled a situation where two products would compete in application and function – actually minimizing their individual customer benefits.
We found other issues like marketers who routinely spend countless hours scouring the web, using different sources time and time again that nobody actually questions for reliability, consistency and accuracy. There was no economy of scale benefit either for intelligence purchases.
Other situations again demonstrated that some of us were missing out on important market developments such as surprise mergers and capacity shifts, major investments or changes in regulations and legislation as a result of the lack of interconnected alerts systems between business and service units. For example a drop in government funded import duty reductions in an Asian country was only recognized a short period of time before the actually regulation change. Without the possibility to properly and carefully prepare our customers for the upcoming change in pricing to compensate for the financial impact we were forced to shock them with a surprise announcement. This accounts for a classical lack in early warnings capabilities.
We also identified issues that occurred because of manual and mediocre ways of storing and disseminating market studies and other intelligence material. Investments into intelligence did not unfold their full potential that way and many colleagues wasted time to identify availability and accessibility of intelligence that we possessed. Here again: every business unit entertained different methods and tools.
These and other shortcomings can easily lead to a dilemma: Without a proper CI process and life cycle (see Picture A, Market & Competitive Intelligence Life Cycle) in place management might base their decisions on a combination of fragmented availability of information and conventional wisdom as opposed to fabricated, facts-based and intelligence needs driven education; in worst cases: on luck! But you don’t really want to tell your management that their past decisions were based on hot air!