Competitive intelligence is a field that interests many people. It combines business intelligence and knowledge management for a common business purpose: bringing focused data, information, and knowledge from outside the organization about specific competitors' business activities or general market trends so that we can sell more and profit more.
This is a complex topic requiring specific activities and a comprehensive action plan. This review is based mainly on an article from KnowledgePoint.com.au (Australia, for those unsure…), and anyone wanting to delve deeper is invited to refer to the source.
Definition:
A competitive intelligence plan is an ongoing activity in which an organizational team examines the industry's development and the capabilities and behaviors of existing and potential competitors to help maintain or create a competitive advantage.
It should be noted that competitive intelligence uses public and legally permitted information sources.
The main applications served by competitive intelligence are:
Business development
Planning
Mergers and acquisitions
Organizational restructuring
Marketing
Pricing
Advertising
R&D
We are in a period of constant and impressive improvement in the capabilities of computational tools for collecting, analyzing, and alerting on competitive intelligence. Despite this, the main role of the competitive intelligence team remains business-oriented.
The roles of the competitive intelligence management team include building the infrastructure of the competitive intelligence system: deciding on support factors, information sources, and work processes, and an ongoing basis -
Defining needs
Collecting content
Evaluating and analyzing raw data and information
Preparing and presenting data and information for organizational use
Distributing content within the organization
Tools and techniques that can be used for competitive intelligence:
Approaching public and government agencies - Useful information that can be vital but usually takes time to obtain
Searching online databases - A quick method to access information, but more expensive. Limited in scope
Approaching companies and the investment fund community is a method worth considering. Sometimes, you can approach the company itself for information.
Surveys and interviews - Surveys include a lot of information about respondents; interviews are helpful for in-depth examination
Reviewing competitors' places - Including their websites, advertisements and publications, brochures they produce, and more.
Benchmarking - Used (mainly) for operational comparison of the company against competitors
Defensive business intelligence analysis - Monitoring and analyzing the organization's business activities and understanding how competitors and other external people view them
Reverse Engineering - Reverse analysis of competitors' products and services to learn about their quality and costs
Not every tool is suitable for every type of need, organization, and business reality; it needs to be practically adapted; otherwise, our efforts will be counterproductive.
The main challenges in competitive intelligence today include:
Faulty verification occurs, for example, when cross-referencing information from several sources, but these are not independent and rely on each other when the source is incorrect
Misleading information stems from incomplete, inaccurate, or intentionally misleading data and information
Information overload makes it difficult for the business intelligence team to perform its activities and for the user who is supposed to use it.
Indeed, there are additional challenges, but these are the general ones that seem familiar to all organizations.
There are many points here for thinking about and upgrading the competitive intelligence system and its activity plan in most organizations.
Comments