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Thursday, November 26, 2009
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VOLUME 1
ISSUE 11
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CI in the internet era: new models, new possibilities.
Gaurav Rewari, CEO firstRain, Inc. rewari@firstrain.com
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Summary: While many CI models today are centered on analysis and interpretation of data that can be weeks, sometimes months old, Internet-based tools are making it possible for CI professionals to operate in near-real time. Such tools leverage the growing information available on the Web to provide corporations with actionable market intelligence about their business environment and competitors. Gaurav Rewari reviews how current software helps CI practitioners discover relevant information.
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While many CI models today are centered on analysis and interpretation of data that can be weeks, sometimes months old, Internet-based tools are making it possible for CI professionals to operate in near-real time. Such tools leverage the growing information available on the Web to provide corporations with actionable market intelligence about their business environment and competitors.
To sustain their competitive advantage, businesses must stay aware of, and act quickly on, changes in competitor tactics and alliances, regional market trends, consumer preferences, adjacent industry projections, and even geo-political developments. All of this information is available on the Internet, but finding it and incorporating it into analysis presents unique challenges:
- The large volume of information published and its unstructured nature makes it difficult to determine the relevance and freshness of information gathered from the Internet.
- The magnitude and dynamic nature of the Web requires many different sources to be simultaneously integrated, quickly scanned, and continuously monitored.
- Once this information is analyzed and categorized, it must be efficiently distributed to all of the users who need it—keeping in mind their different job roles and the different ways they will use the information (databases, spreadsheets, email).
Intelligence portals
Current technology solutions integrate advanced information discovery, monitoring, and proactive event notification into personalized “intelligence portals." These portals, based on any of the many enterprise portal frameworks, collect very specific, extremely granular information and disseminate it directly to those who need it. They free the CI practitioner to spend more time on analysis efforts, and also support highly targeted CI applications. For example, a personalized ‘To Know’ list can be created for each individual that displays and prioritizes what that person needs to know. This information can also be archived to maintain historical context.
To be truly effective, an Internet-based CI application must help companies to answer questions that go beyond the simple tracking of press releases or other pre-packaged sources of information. Its output must be relevant and fresh information from which important insight can be inferred and acted upon.
For example, a CI practitioner could use the Internet-based application to discover a series of acquisitions in a nascent market space that signals a move by a competitor into a new product space. It could also track information on unauthorized dealers reselling the product, current street prices for the product (as well as for competitive products), and whether ‘gray market’ sales are having an effect on authorized dealer sales. A colleague in a pharmaceutical company could monitor the progress of new competitive drugs through the clinical trials and approvals process, ensuring awareness of any movement that would threaten competitive position.
Discovering information
Highly specific search parameters and filtering of the ‘discovered’ information make it possible for CI practitioners in any industry to automate and activate the information collection and distribution process. firstRain, Inc., provides a software platform that ‘discovers’ key CI information. It can automatically publish the information or allow a CI expert to manually publish the information within the framework of an analysis project.
In either case, users in the enterprise ‘subscribe’ to the information most relevant to their needs based on powerful content-based routing capabilities. As a result, each user is notified and information delivered to job-specific ‘To Know’ lists in near real-time. This list displays continuously updated mission-critical information that matches criteria established by the user in a format that enables access, analysis, and action based on dynamic market factors.
Using this approach you can discover information that helps gain a complete picture of the competitive landscape, such as: who is entering or exiting from a given market, and why? What products are they introducing or dropping?
Types of information that enterprises from every industry can leverage include:
- Published pricing information.
- New product announcements.
- Product reviews.
- Customer win announcements.
- Partnership announcements.
- Published papers.
- Job postings.
- Internet message boards (to gauge the marketplace “buzz” about the enterprise and competitors).
- Legal filings.
- Conference proceedings.
- The Web at large (for very specific news related to the economic and political environment of global operations).
Faster and more effective information flow, coupled with the depth of information currently available via the Internet, provides CI practitioners with a distinct advantage over their competitors. Implementing an Instant Awareness™ platform is the next important step in allowing enterprises to better capitalize upon the investment they are already making in competitive intelligence.
Background:
Gaurav Rewari is CEO of firstRain, Inc., the leading provider of Instant Awareness(tm) software for the enterprise. As former vice president of MicroStrategy, Inc., a thought leader in the business intelligence, data warehousing and eCRM space, Gaurav helped to lead MicroStrategy from a startup to a $200 million company with 2000 employees and operations in 50 countries. Gaurav holds a BS, MS and EE in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT. He is married to Radhica Capoor, a linguist, and lives in New York City. He enjoys tennis, cricket and squash.
Copyright Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
SCIP.online, volume 1 number 11, June 18, 2002.
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