Getting Competitive

Competitive intelligence is a smart next step for information pros

By Cynthia Cheng Correia -- Library Journal, 4/15/2006

Janet wanted to make the change from corporate library and information science (LIS) to competitive intelligence (CI) and sought me out to coach her in this transition. She enjoyed her exposure to marketing, possessed some CI and management experience, and had solidly transferable skills. After I took stock of her qualifications, identified skills and knowledge gaps, and devised a plan for her transition, Janet landed a position managing CI and began to immerse herself in CI and upper-level business cultures.

Janet’s new role as a CI manager required her to learn quickly about her firm’s strategy, operations, finance, human resources, culture, and more. She needed to understand how it generates profits, as well as its strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities. Of course, she also needed to understand the firm’s competitors, how they operate and profit and their likely decisions and moves—she had to conduct competitive intelligence.

CI has become an attractive concept for LIS pros, as information and research functions have become commoditized by end users, and financial, competitive, and performance pressures increase the need to demonstrate value. In the current competitive and cost-cutting environment, business stakes are higher. Many corporate info pros find that CI is a way to broaden their skills, raise their visibility, and more directly contribute to their firms’ operations and direction.

In many cases, too, information professionals are themselves driving competitive intelligence initiatives out of professional interest and leadership. In corporate settings, info pros usually expand their business research skills into competitive research, then onto competitive analysis of varying complexity.

A tool for excellent decisions

The intelligence in CI is typically achieved through analysis, the results of which support decision-making. We can easily describe CI as a marriage between government intelligence framework and the practices and tools for business research and analysis. Why do we need CI when we regularly make decisions just fine and without a formal CI process? CI isn’t designed for the “just fine” or “just in time.” By nature, intelligence is forward looking, often anticipatory, and used to achieve or maintain excellence.

CI also serves to challenge our inherent blind spots and assumptions about our organizations, competitive forces, users, and environment. We may use it in preparation of a five-year strategic plan, for example. Barring a crystal ball, we can’t definitively predict events and conditions, but CI can help us better understand the forces that impact our organization, monitor developments, and arrive at insights that can inform more robust plans and better decisions.

The intelligence process

Briefly defined, a complete CI program requires the ability to identify the needs of its key users (i.e., decision-makers) and define their key intelligence topics (KITs) and key intelligence questions (KIQs); plan and direct any CI projects or initiatives; conduct research using published sources (literature searches); conduct research using human sources (interviews and other primary material); analyze and produce the results of the research using a range of models and tools; and share the findings of any research, analysis, and recommendations.

Competitive intelligence still suffers many misconceptions about what it is, how it may be applied, and who should practice it. Through misunderstanding and the occasional bad practice, CI has acquired an “ick” factor for some. When practiced ethically and thoughtfully, however, CI is a powerful and valuable tool that helps organizations and professionals recognize opportunities and mitigate risks. It certainly isn’t corporate espionage, nor is it illegal or inherently distasteful. In fact, corporate espionage is to CI as fraudulent accounting practices are to corporate finance. Both competitive intelligence and accounting are essential to good corporate strategy and operations, but any illegal or unethical practices will taint these vital functions.

Beyond the corporate world

Certainly the benefits of competitive intelligence aren’t limited to corporations. From nations to nonprofits, organizations of all types experience competition that can be identified, understood, monitored, and anticipated. CI provides an efficient and effective process and framework for developing those capabilities, and it produces deliverables that help organizations formulate and test their strategies and tactics.

For example, the Five Forces Model, a fundamental CI analytical framework, was defined by Michael E. Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School and a thought leader in competitiveness of organizations and nations. His work and those of many CI professionals are transferable and applicable to nonprofit and traditional library settings. While profit may not be the motive here, we are still concerned with heavy competition for funding; dynamic—and sometimes volatile—pressures from suppliers (including information and content vendors); quickly evolving LIS technology and costs; shifting user habits, needs, and expectations; outside products and services that may be considered alternative or substitutes; and best practices and benchmarks from other organizations.

Is CI for you?

Competitive intelligence functions are established in most major corporations and many smaller ones, and info pros have increasingly embraced CI. While the CI process should be aligned with top management needs, functions supporting CI may reside with a CI unit or in marketing, business development, information center, or elsewhere. It may also be distributed across departments. Janet, for instance, has become her firm’s intelligence expert and provides guidance and direction to her bosses.

Early in this job, Janet became an expert on her firm, its industry, and its competitors. She developed the firm’s CI resources and capabilities, including staff and research and analysis tools. She met with managers to understand their concerns and needs, then devised a plan for developing resources and methodology, established an ethics policy in collaboration with the legal department, designed research guides, built upon her team’s network of contacts, designed a contacts database, gathered competitor literature and products, compiled industry and competitor profiles, and pinpointed contract analysts to supplement internal analytical knowledge.

Janet also educated her colleagues about CI, its purpose and value, and devised ways for them to contribute to her firm’s competitive intelligence efforts.

Transferable skills?

As we can see from the functions in the Intelligence Process diagram (at left), CI is specialized and not for everyone. Each intelligence function requires specific and often dedicated skills and qualities that may be mutually exclusive. For example, the characteristics for a crack literature searcher may not translate easily to human source interviewing or analysis. Good intelligence literature searching requires skills, judgments, and techniques that are not only logical, precise, and detailed but highly creative. Human source collection requires excellent social skills and/or the ability to elicit information from people, often strangers. Analysis requires the ability to discern patterns and trends from seemingly disparate sets of data and information—a knack for details and the big picture. Many practitioners suggest that, while skills may be learned, essential qualities for the distinct CI functions are instinctive.

Not all LIS professionals, however, are interested in a full transition into competitive intelligence. Many are simply interested in applying some CI functions and skills, either in support of research in their organization’s CI process or for a modest CI initiative. This can be extremely rewarding for both the LIS professional and the organization, by enhancing the information services function and its value as well as the organization’s capabilities.

Whether you are an interested professional or organization, adopting or ensuring a more efficient, rapid, and seamless transition into CI requires training, as well as access to experiential knowledge, awareness, support, and proper tools. For this, a formal CI advisor, consultant, or mentor can be invaluable. Further, the professional or manager must embrace CI and business cultures, expectations, and practices. Organizations like the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals or SLA’s Competitive Intelligence Division are places to begin. SLA’s Click U Live! will present a CI seminar in August 2006.