Jens Thieme Weblog

Pre-Release of Jens Thieme's chapter in "Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function" - Part 2

As announced earlier I will contribute to the Competitive Intelligence Foundation's January 2008 book "Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function".

Still in development I'd like to release abstracts of the book chapter for early discussion. The sections will be extended in the final version and some content will only be released when finally published in the book.

...Part 1 "Harmonizing Competitive Intelligence" ...
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"...We found other issues like marketers who routinely spend countless hours scouring the web, using different sources time and time again that nobody actually questions for reliability, consistency and accuracy. There was no economy of scale benefit either for intelligence purchases.

Other situations again demonstrated that some of us were missing out on important market developments such as surprise mergers and capacity shifts, major investments or changes in regulations and legislation as a result of the lack of interconnected alerts systems between business and service units. For example a drop in government funded import duty reductions in an Asian country was only recognized a short period of time before the actually regulation change. Without the possibility to properly and carefully prepare our customers for the upcoming change in pricing to compensate for the financial impact we were forced to shock them with a surprise announcement. This accounts for a classical lack in early warnings capabilities.

We also identified issues that occurred because of manual and mediocre ways of storing and disseminating market studies and other intelligence material. Investments into intelligence did not unfold their full potential that way and many colleagues wasted time to identify availability and accessibility of intelligence that we possessed. Here again: every business unit entertained different methods and tools.

These and other shortcomings can easily lead to a dilemma: Without a proper CI process and life cycle (see Picture A, Market & Competitive Intelligence Life Cycle) in place management might base their decisions on a combination of fragmented availability of information and conventional wisdom as opposed to fabricated, facts-based and intelligence needs driven education; in worst cases: on luck! But you don’t really want to tell your management that their past decisions were based on hot air!

Hint: The status quo and reviews of historic intelligence features need very careful research. There is nothing more embarrassing and damaging than presenting an issue when in fact there was a hidden solution at play that actually did work to some extend." ...Part 3 "Recognizing the inconvenient truth" ...
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Stay tuned for part 3 and mark your calendar for the final release of "Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function". And by-the-way: to the same topic area I will host sessions at SCIA (Swiss Competitive Intelligence Association) September 18th in Zurich and at the SCIP (Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) European Summit 2007 in Bad Nauheim October 25th.

The complete chapter "Harmonizing Competitive Intelligence in a Traditional Industry Corporation" can be found at MarkIntell.com in its entirety.