After some technical glitches preventing a regular update to the blog yesterday, we were all back online at this morning's opening session of Perfect Information Conference, day 2.
The stage was opened up to Trevor Foster-Black, the founder and CEO of Coalition, who had come to tell us about how his organisation delivers competitive intelligence to his clients. What this involved was an outline of the general model they use and a few anecdotal pointers that are worth considering if you are tasked with a similar responsibility. As information professionals you may well have access to much of this corporate business information.
Knowing who knows what in your organisation is vital when approaching the task of telling an organisation more about itself. Finding out what its assets are and how it compares to its competitors isn’t necessarily a straightforward task.
By examining your internal information in the guise of staff knowledge and then combining that with what is available publicly you can start the process of getting your hands on some very valuable data.
Rather than detail the complex metrics and statistical analysis models that Coalition use, I’ll ad-lib on the more general advice Foster Black offered us.
For a start, defining the metrics and language used in the initial brief is critical first step. Agree with the client on certain meanings so you don't go off and fail to answer their actual question. Consider your framework and what you want to achieve as well as where you are going to get your information.
Take publicly available information of the organisation, then at the back end fill it with relevant data and research you don't yet have, the net effect is quite powerful apparently.
Manage expectations on what competitive intelligence can offer to the client. Also be prepared that the results you get indicating a clients position in their market might not actually match up with where they think there are, ‘no one likes to be told they’re not as good as they think they are’ said Foster-Black.
To get around this, he advised getting all stakeholders involved, to provide feedback and ensure any data differences are reconciled or highlighted in advanced. Be prepared to show on your audit trail of information why you have the results you do – people will disagree with results so you must be able to show why you have reached the conclusion you have. This means highlighting methodology error margins and un-reconciled issues at the start.
When presenting the results, consider that the executive summary of your research will be the most read part. Few people will read a report from start to finish even if they do use it as a reference manual.
If in your competitive intelligence research you are surveying comments from a variety of people about the company, it’s ok to include factual statements alongside opinion and pure gossip, providing you clearly indicate which is which. This makes for a much richer piece of content, and provide an alternative insight.
If I would take anything away from this, it is that with complex data-crunching, competitive intelligence is a combination of a huge disciplined research effort and a bucket of common sense.
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