While following Ms. Ellen Naylor (http://twitter.com/EllenNaylor) on Twitter, I noticed a reference to a blog post about using various tools to monitor what your competitors are doing, where they are working and what people are saying about them. I have to say I was surprised about what I found there!

The post begins with the sentence: "As a rule of thumb, your should gather competitive intelligence (CI) for your business.". The thought continues by pointing out the importance of understanding your competitors, industry trends and potential threats for your business. However, the claim made by the posting is that in order to achieve this awareness, a filter is what is needed.

Filtering information is an important function of developing competitive intelligence. When you set up a system (or series of systems) to monitor industry news and focus on keyword terms (e.g., competitors’ names, product names, locations, etc.) you are compiling data. The intelligence is the value added by looking at the information and then analyzing, which goes beyond filtering, to answer specific questions. The answers to your questions, and who they are delivered to, become the actionable intelligence that your business can use.

My point is not to argue semantics with the writer of the blog post but I do think that business owners would be misled if they were looking to create a competitive intelligence function and got the impression that gathering and organizing data was the principal benefit of CI. It is worth pointing out that articles in the Society of Competitive Intelligence (SCIP) magazine in 2008 did highlight a trend in towards viewing CI as more data collection and filtering. This process is a good starting point but I happen to focus on delivering intelligence as something that is not solely a monitoring service. Intelligence for a business should equip senior managers with insights and perspectives that they might not have considered as a necessary adjunct to any specific answers they had originally requested. Managers and leaders may not know what they do not “know” and this can be a valuable aspect of a competitive intelligence function as well.

I recently took on a research question that required me to look for online and first-person information that referred to multiple overseas locations. At first glance, it appeared that the core question and the supporting issues could be answered with a few email exchanges complemented by some online research. As the responses started to roll in, it became clear that my initial assumptions were not entirely accurate.

The information I thought I was going to find in the public domain wasn’t as easy to locate as I had hoped. Instead, I found some of the data was available but gaps still remained. By this stage, I recognized that my working research knowledge might not have identified all of the options available to me. So I turned to the social networks that I am involved with and posed a question. In this case I used LinkedIn and was quite pleasantly surprised with the responses.

Within just a day after I posted the question I began receiving responses that were both informative and free of obvious self-promotion. Also, the replies were entirely on topic and didn’t attempt to redirect the conversation to an unrelated issues or websites. Overall, I can recommend the Q&A services at LinkedIn as a good supplemental resource for more information. In this case I was searching for data that might have been available for purchase from information services such as Hoovers, but I was impressed to see that my contacts in LinkedIn (and people outside of my connections) were able to expand the list of potential information sources, both free and fee-based.

It will be interesting to see how future questions will be answered depending on their complexity and niche. I am sure that I will be spending more time on LinkedIn to try and answer questions posed by other users in light of my positive experience so far.

As part of the never-ending effort to use the resources found among the podcasts of iTunes, I was searching for new ‘listening experiences’ and came across the Competitive Intelligence Podcast. This site and associated blog and podcasts are managed by a Mr. August Jackson.

Mr. Jackson has taken the time to put together a very user-friendly site with a variety of feedback tools. I am not sure what his current audience is but it deserves to be larger. I recently listened to episodes 6 thru 9 and found useful information in each one. I think one of the best episodes to date was No. 8, which featured an interview with John McGonagle. I have read several pieces written by Mr. McGonagle as part of my graduate studies and he definitely helps to define the current standards for effective competitive intelligence. It was a pleasure listening to the interview.

On a note more related to the themes of this blog, it seems that some coverage on the rols of competitive intelligence in international development would be a desirable topic for future podcasts. Mr. Jackson’s website and podcasts are an excellent way for someone to become familiar with CI as it currently applies to acommercial/corporate environment. An important complement to the commercial CI sector is the non-profit area. In a brief internet search I came across one firm that lists its experience in CI for non-profits (SIS International Research) and a tutorial about the importance of competitive intelligence for non-profits (Penn State Access eNonProfit).

It seems like a worthwhile market research project to determine what firms work in the area of international development and which of these actively employ competitive intelligence staff as part of their standard activities. I am open to any comments from readers about resources that (likely) already exist in this topic and meanwhile I will have a new item on my professional development “to do” list.