Business Intelligence Users Identification
Top of the stakeholders of any market intelligence unit, process or program are always the intelligence users. Marketers and sales staff who use market intelligence, competitive intelligence, business information, data and competitor profiles, studies and market reports to excel in their marketing and sales roles; these are the decision makers, the users that will eventually nurture or destroy an intelligence setup.
By identifying market intelligence users within marketing and sales groups and management that might be served intelligence abstracts on different schedules and agendas, a major resource and success factor is being detected and utilized. Intelligence requirements and terms of quality, delivery mechanisms and usability have to be determined by these intelligence users.
Just as much as any businesses or services customers would determine the very value of any offering, the intelligence users have to lay the ground work for a successful intelligence effort. If marketers do not know how to use intelligence in their marketing plans, market segmentation efforts or value proposition analysis chances are, the marketing groups need to be educated about such necessary marketing activities first and would not even know about the real value of proper business intelligence.
For example if a marketing group needs to segment markets and customers in order to position a new product range that is demanded by potential and existing customers the intelligence needed like market size, geo-political implications, future growth trends, raw material streams and other implications about the supply base and many other factors need to be prepared and delivered as requested by the marketing department, following their needs to visualize the data and information.
There is no use of feeding tons of unstructured press releases and data into any intelligence system in the hope of some marketer will extract that piece of information and transform it into a view that is requested by herself.
If users express requirements of how they want to read the market, this should determine the final intelligence output format. In larger corporations it makes fine sense to form a cross-functional network of business intelligence users to grow with each other into this type of thinking and setup: how do we want to visualize intelligence to point out desired conclusions?