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90% of the information a company needs to understand its market and competitors and to make key decisions is already public
At the Core
This article:
* Defines competitive intelligence
* Discusses why CI is important for a business
* Explains how to collect the CI a business needs
For more than a decade, there have been those who have worked to reconize the existence and utility of active, externally oriented, intelligence gathering in their operation. This strategy was (and sometimes still is) variously called "competitive intelligence," "business intelligence,"corporate intelligence," "competitive information," or "commercial intelligence." Most practitioners have now settled on one term -"competitive intelligence" (CI).
CI consists of two facets:
* The use of public sources to develop data (raw facts) on competition, competitors, and the market environment.
* The transformation, by analysis, of that data into information (usable results) able to support business decisions.
Today, there are at least four separate types of active, as opposed to defensive, CI.
Understanding CI today requires an understanding of what is meant by "public." The term is to be taken in its broadest sense: it encompasses more than studies that the U.S. Department of Labor releases or what is reported in The Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald. In CI, "public" is not equivalent to published. It is significantly broader in concept.
Here, "public" means all information that can legally and ethically be identified, located, and then accessed. This ranges from a document filed by a competitor as part of a local zoning application to the text of a press release issued by a competitor's marketing consultant describing the client's proposed marketing strategy while the marketing firm extols the specifics of its contributions to the design of a new product and the related opening of a new plant. It includes the Web-cast discussions between senior management and securities analysts as well as the call notes created by the organization's own sales force. It is the common principle of the use and analysis of publicly available information to assist in the effective management of a company that links the variations of CI.
How CI Works
The CI process is usually divided into five basic phases, each linked to the others by a feedback loop. These...