Eight things Competitive Intelligence is … not (1)
During conversations with people in general, the only aspect that comes up repeatedly when we talk about competitive intelligence is the general lack of knowledge and in many cases pre-established ideas that contradict reality.
Therefore, it would seem a good idea to debunk some of those misconceptions to better focus on what is the reality of competitive intelligence.
Competitive intelligence is not spying. If we understand spying as an illegal activity, by which privileged information is obtained through the use of certain methods that should not be employed from an ethical or legal perspective. That is certainly not competitive intelligence. However, it is true that a great deal of information is obtained from our competitors, information that is too often hidden in plain sight, and that we just have to be able to find and analyze. In many cases, this information is provided by our own competitors or their customers in their social networks, press releases, financial statements, annual reports or their corporate websites; other times it is the media in their news; or patent offices accepting or rejecting innovations presented by those competitors. In short, we use the information available, which in our society increases exponentially every little time, analyze it and draw conclusions that, in many cases, are much more accurate than those obtained by industrial espionage, which would be limited to a specific element within the overall strategy of our competitor.
It is not a crystal ball that magically unveils the strategies of our competitors and guides us as an oracle in our business path. It is a complex and laborious process that gives us indications of different precision based on the quality of the data and analysis that we are able to feed into the system. At all times will be realistic approximations to the specific situation of a market or competitor, analyzing as many variables of all kinds as possible, and this is where human intelligence and the perception capacity of those who are knowledgeable about a market provide the differential element to the analysis, contributing with their experience to the interpretation of raw data and also those processed by artificial intelligence and machine learning processes.
It is not a search engine. While it is true that the search capability of any Competitive Intelligence system is important, it is not the only function of a modern environment. It is possible that in certain solutions created years ago the search engine or content indexing was the most important feature, but today we should not be satisfied with that alone. We should at least be able to eliminate superfluous information, to obtain data hidden in the generic contents, to continuously post-process the information so that we can reuse it for different purposes. In short, the search engine is there, but it is not the fundamental element, but a support tool that allows us to identify competitive gaps and define strategies.
It is not a monolithic solution. There is no one tool that is the gold standard for competitive intelligence. Even the same tool would not be useful without modification or customization throughout the life cycle of a company. It would be absolutely impossible to create a solution that would work efficiently for all companies. Not only because of their size, but above all because of their different strategies and decision-making circuits. A small company in a highly controlled and regulated environment, for example, transportation, does not need the same type of information as companies in which the intuitive and creative component plays a fundamental role, such as advertising agencies. This does not mean that none of them should give up analyzing their competitors and modeling their strategies based on the data obtained, but the tools used in each case must be adapted to the realities of each market and context.
