Developing a Successful Competitive Intelligence Program

Learn from best-practice organizations how to develop a competitive intelligence (CI) structure, mobilize resources to implement the CI program, create action-oriented products and services to improve the speed and quality of decision-making, and measure and evolve the CI program in Developing a Successful Competitive Intelligence Program: Enabling Action, Realizing Results, an APQC benchmarking study conducted in partnership with the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).

KEY FINDINGS

• The beginning of a CI effort is more characteristic of a "Big Bang" than an orderly process--being emergent rather than structured. The process begins as a result of a critical incident and emerges over time as a result of a few key activities.
• With leanly staffed CI functions, the "right" personnel are critical to developing and refining CI's role in the organization. Strategic thinking, communication skills, analytical skills, and interpersonal skills are the highest priorities among partners.IT skills, education, and experience requirements--whether industry, company, or CI--vary contingent upon CI focus.
• Weaving CI into the fabric of the organization's business processes and developing its influence in decision-making begins with a promotional plan and develops over time, through a three-stage upgrade and refinement cycle. As a CI group upgrades and refines its products and services, it ultimately becomes involved with key strategic and tactical teams, resulting in a high level of influence. For each stage of the cycle, there is a different focus on activities and roles of champions, networks, IT, and training.
• Frequent, high-quality interactions increase a CI unit's ability to anticipate and satisfy customers' needs, create more valuable products and services, and result in more knowledgeable users--each critical to enhancing the trust and credibility of CI personnel.
• Whether tightly coordinated or decentralized in nature, internal and external networks play a vital part in refining and upgrading CI's role in the organization.Access to knowledgeable, responsive, and credible resources increases CI's ability to deliver timely, value-adding products and services.
• Best-practice CI functions find the following critical to improving the speed and quality of their companies' decision-making: a request process, knowledgeable users, a mandated analytical framework, implications-focused analysis, a central position in the organization's network, information technology enablers, value-added vendor relationships, and defined yet evolving product/service portfolios.
• How the CI program is evaluated drives its evolution or dissolution. Best-practice companies' formal and informal evaluations, gap analyses, and continuous improvement efforts propel their CI processes closer to the ultimate CI vision--where competitive intelligence is inextricably intertwined in all business processes and key strategic and tactical decisions.
• Development of a CI program proceeds through four stages: prestart-up, start-up, established, and world-class. While each stage is associated with key indicators and transition activities to the next stage, external and internal factors that cause reversals to earlier stages--if not failure of the CI program--must be examined as well.