Wednesday, April 9, 2003 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 29   HOME Peer-to-peer technology helps identify internal information. Joel Silver, Opencola  joels@opencola.com It is no striking revelation that information today is ubiquitous. There is a subscription database, information service, document management system or corporate intranet for whatever information requirement currently ails you. For many competitive intelligence professionals, the growing availability of information has been a welcome resource in their quest for data on their competitors’ background and activities. Unfortunately, having the time and resources to effectively cover the multitude of distributed channels to access this information has become difficult to the point of being nearly impossible. Additionally, a CI practitioner does not necessarily want to know just what the rest of the world already knows from public documents. When it comes to capturing intelligence on your industry, competitors and even your own company, there is likely to be a wealth of information within your own organization – whether it resides on the hard-drive of a sales rep across the hall, within a marketing manager’s public relations plan on another floor or even in an accounting clerk’s financial report from a subsidiary across the globe. As a result, many CI professionals are starting to look within their own organizations for the relevant information that gives them a competitive edge. Are document and content management systems the answer? Most organizations today have deployed some type of technology to help manage their internal content and make it freely available to the rest of the company. Document and content management solutions provide us with centralized repositories of knowledge – offering both internally-published documents and sometimes additional proprietary data captured through external content providers (Lexis Nexis, Factiva, Hoover's). These systems have certainly provided document-rich companies with a means to effectively control the flow of, and access to, explicit information (published content) within their organizations -- but are they enough? Recently, Delphi Group, a leading industry research analyst firm, stated “only 12% of a typical company’s knowledge is explicit and shared” via centralized document repositories such as internal databases, content and document management systems, collaboration portals and corporate intranets. This clearly illustrates the most significant downside to centralized content and knowledge management systems: they often do not contain the lion’s share of corporate knowledge that exists beyond structured databases. They also do not tap into the tacit knowledge that resides in the personal spaces and experienced minds of employees. The bulk of corporate knowledge is scattered across the enterprise on employees’ personal hard-drives, in e-mail folders, Internet bookmarks and within the private minds of the staff themselves. Then why do we rely so much on centralized data as our key source of corporate knowledge? For competitive intelligence professionals, the challenge is to source new and current information on competitors. To ensure no stone is left unturned, consider the following tips for internal information gathering: 1: Tap in to the collective intelligence that currently exists within your own company. There are many external sources of information that are helpful to a CI professional. Subscription databases, press releases, news feeds, company websites and Internet chatrooms are all good sources of competitive content. However, CI practitioners should never overlook the hidden treasures of information that may be available in their own backyard. If you don’t know where to start looking, find out what systems you currently have in place to share knowledge. Ask your IT Manager what, if any, plans your employer has to implement knowledge sharing tools to help staff exchange ideas and information.You might be pleasantly surprised to find that they are already looking for solutions. 2: Leverage unstructured intelligence, not just the contents of databases. To effectively capitalize on the knowledge of your peers, you must go beyond what is available through central document repositories and databases. Most knowledge workers have volumes of information that are never added to shared databases. Research notes, work-in-progress documents, bookmarked Internet pages and other unstructured data can be a priceless source of intelligence to you. Talk to your management or IT staff and find out how your company can implement effective tools or processes to disseminate and share this knowledge across your enterprise. 3: Follow the knowledge trail to personally connect with people who can help you. The transfer of knowledge can be both formal and informal. Formal knowledge transfer exists through explicit means, such as searching databases or corporate intranets for specific information. Informal knowledge transfer can occur in a multitude of places from a multitude of sources. One of the most valuable sources can be a person-to-person discussion. For large multi-national organizations, the opportunity to personally connect with the people who can give you valuable insight on customers and competitors isn’t always physically possible. But there is another way to identify your in-house experts – simply follow the corporate knowledge trail. If you find internal information that is of interest to you, make an effort to connect with the author or authors and ask for additional details. Find out what sources the author used to find their information and if they can offer any other background information that did not make it in to the formal document, but was instead used to support their analysis or recommendations. You may discover the most significant and relevant information is derived from the informal background and experience of the actual people who create the documents and not the documents themselves. The value of tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge is the “behind the scenes” information or expertise that is applied to decision-making in companies every day. In short, it is the information that exists within the minds and experiences of an organization’s people. Without resorting to the ‘Vulcan mind-meld,’ how can an organization tap into the unpublished and unstructured knowledge of its workforce? Enter peer-to-peer (P2P) technology which initially entered the mainstream market through the introduction of free Internet tools such as Napster and Kazaa (the exchange of MP3 music files). Although these specific examples may be technically or morally, or legally flawed, the concept of peer-to-peer networking is extremely promising in the corporate environment as a powerful tool for information discovery and knowledge sharing. As P2P technology continues to evolve, organizations are learning more about the benefit of internal P2P networks as an effective means of information discovery, knowledge sharing, and subject expert identification. The foundation of P2P networking rests on the belief that to get the right information you’re looking for in the least amount of time, cut out the middle-man and go directly to the source. There is likely a world of information sitting right under your nose – you just need to go out and get it. About the Author Joel Silver, vice-president of marketing and business development, is responsible for the communications, product management, and critical business development for Opencola Ltd., headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Prior to Opencola, he was a founder and Vice President of Marketing for SalesDriver. Joel's early career included roles as a financial analyst and a brand manager with Procter & Gamble. Joel currently leads a marketing strategy class at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto. Joel holds an Honour Business Administration degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Opencola’s technology enables organizations to capitalize on corporate-wide intelligence by providing single-point access to external Internet and news sources, existing centralized document repositories and databases, as well as distributed, unstructured knowledge across the enterprise. Opencola offers a free 30-day trial of the software for individual use which can be downloaded from the company’s website at http://www.opencola.com Copyright 2003 Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.www.scip.org scip.online, issue 29, April 9, 2003 [PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION] There are no letters available. [POST]

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