Eight things Competitive Intelligence is … not (2)
It is not useful if it is not used. Although this may seem a truism, it is a reality that we detect in many companies. While most of them do not have a Competitive Intelligence solution, it is true that many have implemented fractional solutions that, in many cases, fall into disuse after a short time, either because of their complexity, apathy, resistance to change or many other factors. It is therefore imperative that whatever IC solutions are used on a day-to-day basis, and above all, that the changes are driven by the management, which is willing to act on the basis of the obtained insights and to permeate the entire company with such knowledge.
It’s not vaporware. It has deep roots in the history of companies and nations. In fact, we can go back in time and identify business operations to observe that some form of Competitive Intelligence already existed. For example, if we analyze the commercial strategies of the Phoenicians, we see with total clarity that they not only studied the markets, but also their potential competitors not just locally but globally, and based on that information obtained and shared among them, they decided where they would be interested in establishing commercial colonies, where to establish alliances, to which markets to supply high-value manufactured goods and to which more basic tools. All this at a time when information flows could not be compared with those of today, just remember that a journey between Gadir (today’s Cadiz) and Tyre, on the coast of today’s Lebanon, could take between one and two months depending on weather conditions and the season of the year.
It is not technology-driven. It is driven by people, by management, and is based on critical analysis, review of data and judicious use of results. In all these processes, technology becomes a tool to aid and assist, not to make autonomous decisions. Allowing this level of decision-making to a system, no matter how expert it may seem, and relying on its choices to eliminate the human component of business management would be a major mistake and, undoubtedly, a guarantee of failure for the company. Therefore, we must insist again on understanding technology as a tool that helps to make better decisions, sometimes by buying time, sometimes by eliminating superfluous information, sometimes by finding relationships that we would take time to intuit and most of the time by allowing a more efficient collaboration, but never in the final decision-making, especially strategic ones.
It is not a replacement for human capital. We insist again on this same concept, developed earlier, but worth expanding on. The information obtained or generated by the Competitive Intelligence systems is sent to the corresponding departments, which have the ultimate responsibility of deciding on the basis of this data. The more directly the information affects decisions of a more transcendental nature, the more important the human factor will be in the final decision. For example, certain operational or transactional decisions may contain a higher technological decision component than any tactical decision, let alone strategic, where the human component, in all its aspects, not only knowledge but also experience and intuition are decisive, but without forgetting that the use of data provided by Competitive Intelligence tools can make the difference between a good decision and an optimal one.
