Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE DEFINED

When some people think of competitive intelligence, they form an image of a somewhat shady practice where people lie, cheat, and steal and use every means of dishonest corporate espionage to learn what the competition is doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Competitive intelligence gathering is neither dishonest nor something for which your company should be ashamed of engaging in. Competitive intelligence is really just the analytical process by which publicly available information is collected and transformed in an ethical manner through analysis into valuable insight regarding competitors’ market position, performance, capabilities, and intentions for use in tactical and strategic business decisions. The quality of your firm’s competitive intelligence will be a function of several factors, the most important of which is the effectiveness of the CI processes you put in place across your organization.

The key objectives of your competitive intelligence organization should be the following:

• Anticipate and provide an early warning for trends that could negatively affect the business.
• Identify trends early on that represent an opportunity for company growth or improvement.
• Stay current on competitor activities to enable your company to effectively differentiate itself in the minds of customers.
• Build a collective and actionable corporate knowledge base to enable fast decision making.
• Inform and stimulate strategic planning through the ...