What is Competitive Intelligence? (CI)
Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of legally defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, individuals, concepts, information, ideas or data needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization. Competitive Intelligence helps organizations answer questions such as:
- What the competition is currently doing?
- What they are planning to do?
- Where they are planning to do it?
- Why they are doing it?
- How they are going to do it?
- With whom they are doing it?
The Internet explosion over the last few years has really opened up the market for competitive intelligence. The Internet is a great resource for gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence, and there is a great range of competitive intelligence software to chose from. It’s easy to visit the website of your nearest competitor anonymously, for a start, and see just what goodies they have to offer. However, there are now many sophisticated competitive intelligence software products that can legally let you know exactly what’s going on in your competitors business.
More than simply allowing organizations to react to market developments, competitive intelligence can enable an organization to anticipate where the market is going and how their competitors will react. Competitive intelligence provides information to spot weaknesses and opportunities in both an organization’s own strategy and those of its competitors.
Competitive intelligence information is usually delivered to CI users via a Web site. Excellent CI websites are designed with the following attributes:
- Ease of navigation—If a Web site is to be used by CI users to perform some of their own intelligence work, then the site must be user friendly. Little, if any, training should be required for a CI user to find the information needed or to request assistance.
- One-stop access—CI users do not want to traverse multiple sites to find the intelligence activities within their organization. A competitive intelligence Web site should provide one-stop access to all intelligence-related activities.
- Ability to archive—One of the earliest uses of IT for intelligence providers was to search archived reports and intelligence sites. A well-developed archive system allows competitive intelligence providers and clients to easily search and retrieve material, which frees time for you to concentrate on analysis and implications.
- Portals to other areas within/outside corporation—Often, all the intelligence client needs is a brief summary with implications. On other occasions, CI users want to see the details of a particular study, article, or Web site. Links to internal and external sites facilitate access to intelligence and free time for the intelligence producer.
- Learning modules—There is still a shroud of mystery surrounding the intelligence field. One way to debunk the myths of intelligence is for individuals to become more familiar with the roles and techniques of intelligence. A side benefit is that some individuals will want to actively participate in competitive intelligence processes. Learning modules provide a self-paced way for anyone in the organization to study topics in the intelligence field.
- Security—CI can be considered one of the competitive weapons of an organization, so ensuring security of intelligence dissemination is essential.
CI is just now starting to become mainstream. It should not be confused with corporate espionage, which is illegal; CI is completely legal. We will continue to see more organizations invest in CI technologies. In the current environment, it is important to know what the competition is doing and companies that do not invest in CI will have a major competitive disadvantage.
The Enfocus Requirement Suite™ from Enfocus Solutions provides functionality to help organization get ready for technologies such as CI. Requirement Coach™ provides discussion questions based on industry best practices, benchmarking services, and example requirements to help organizations get started with initiatives such as Competitive Intelligence. RequirementPro™ helps organizations elicit needs from internal and external stakeholders and develop a set of requirements that may be used for evaluating and implementing a CI solution.