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.