Given today\u0092s dynamic business environment and the rise of disruptive innovators that are challenging traditional business models across industries, this should be the golden age of CI, right? But a look at Google Trends shows this:<\/p>\n
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What\u0092s gone wrong? Remember that old joke a man was too busy driving to stop for gas? Is that what\u0092s ailing CI? Failing to recognize the disruptive innovations that is changing its own game? As the CI ninjas faithfully use the well-known and unchanged frameworks and send out, with unfailing frequency, the key deliverables such as:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Newsletter<\/li>\n
- Competitor Profiles<\/li>\n
- Battlecards<\/li>\n
- Wargaming and scenario planning<\/li>\n
- Intelligence briefings<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
do they hear questions like I already knew this, Where\u0092s the insight?, I need something real-time, How can I measure success from my CI investment?, What strategic action can I take now? from the key CI consumers in the business? (Consumers including Strategy, Marketing, Product, Research, Sales teams).<\/p>\n
Maybe there\u0092s help. From one of its own techniques. Let\u0092s hone in on the wargaming technique. Defined as a role-played simulation of a business situation, it involves a set of teams representing a market or customer, a set of competitors, and a series of other uncontrollable factors or entities. If we apply it on CI today, what does the world look like for CI?<\/p>\n
1) Customer<\/strong>: Assume, you are part of the Strategy Planning team ofBlackRock Investments,\u00a0<\/a>an investment management group analyzing its competitor
<\/a>. When Fortune published its 2013 list of the world\u0092s 50 Most Admired Companies, five among them were 25 years old or less. Four were the usual suspects from the tech land: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google. And there was BlackRock, formed in 1988, a Financial Services company. $4.3T in assets. But the CEO has still set a target for 5% organic growth y-o-y. Is that achievable? That\u0092s the question. Can a clear understanding of who and why we are doing CI help in the first step of defining CI <\/strong>better per the classical definition? Our customer here is the Strategy team, not Marketing, not Sales, not Product. That\u0092s critical for the CI analyst to know.<\/p>\n
2)\u00a0Set of competitors:<\/strong> Assume your usual deliverable is a detailed competitor profile on BlackRock. Is that enough? What could change the competition for your BlackRock profile and provide the real insight the customer asked for?<\/p>\n
a) Automation and real-time monitoring in CI<\/strong>: Annual report, investor presentations, earnings transcripts, SEC filings, fund performance data from SimFund, eVestment, Morningstar, analyst views, industry news from Financial Times, Investment News, Pension and Investments. Phew. An ocean of data the CI analyst needs to wade through to even start attacking the problem.<\/p>\n
Luckily there is help. Tools such as Feedly can help automate the newsfeeds and personalize the news the CI analyst can read to remove all the additional noise that can result in data drip (data rich, insight poor).<\/p>\n
And then there are tools such as ClearCI which use all the CI sources and provide automated monitoring dashboards for CI.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nCould such tools help in step 2 of the CI definition: information gathering?<\/p>\n
b)\u00a0Digital analysis in CI<\/strong>: Digital data has unleashed a new surge of tools that claim to track all digital competitive data<\/a> from social mentions, text analysis of online product feedback to understanding keywords that drive traffic.<\/p>\n