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Friday, February 10, 2012
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ISSUE 33
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Structuring the CI function for success:
Bulletproofing the intelligence team and overcoming zero-resonance with customers using an outcome-driven approach to intelligence products and services
Arik Johnson, AuroraWDC
The competitive intelligence (CI) community has always been far more focused on how to do their job than on what their job should be. In these tough economic times, becoming more outcome-driven is a necessary shift in focus for every process-obsessed CI practitioner that hopes to stay relevant.
My thoughts on the subject all started taking shape in the autumn of 2002. For 10 days in November, I had the great pleasure of visiting Midrand, South Africa, where I keynoted a competitive intelligence conference. Having never visited the country before, I spent a few extra days on either side of the two-day event seeing the country and thoroughly enjoying myself. During the Q&A portion of my speech, I was asked to compare southern African perspectives on CI techniques with those I've seen elsewhere in the Americas, Europe and Asia. I think many business people in the so-called "developing world" find themselves needlessly humbled by comparisons with the post-industrial economies elsewhere, so this question was not entirely unanticipated, as much as it was unnecessary.
As regards relative sophistication levels of techniques and understanding of best practices, there is little difference between South African views of CI and those elsewhere. In the marketplace of ideas that the Internet offers, there are few impediments to learning about the latest developments in any field from one’s colleagues around the world.
Intelligence as an essential part of business
However, since South Africa is really at the cusp of CI's acceptance into broader practice of business and management, there is a great opportunity afforded those managers that their colleagues elsewhere are only just beginning to understand. Intelligence about competitors, customers, and the rest of the market has always been an essential part of business, every business, to some greater or lesser degree, and different only in terms of formal charter and resource commitment. Knowledge businesspeople as intelligence consumers have always found ways of using CI, whether they called it that or not, to their advantage. Likewise they always will find ways to use CI, regardless of its source internal or external to the organization.
Understanding intelligence customer needs when developing the intelligence process is of paramount importance. In practice this means being entrepreneurial about meeting those needs and ensuring that CI's contribution to the firm continues to be valued. This is the lesson our post-industrial economies have all learned about many parts of any company - let alone the CI team - during the recent period of bloodletting caused by relatively more contractionary effects in the business cycle.
Blending process and outcomes
Competitive intelligence practitioners, as the detail-oriented professionals they are, often focus their attention on the process side of perfecting the use of intelligence techniques, sometimes overlooking the outcomes required by intelligence customers. But, in a time of cost-cutting and tough restructuring decisions, the need for a blended approach between these two sets of priorities in structuring CI for long-term success has never been greater.
Remember that the outcomes perspective of "doing the right thing" (understanding customer needs) must drive the process perspective of "doing the thing right" (structuring how needs are met). Finding the proper mixture remains an elusive calculus of priorities management.
Persistent questions
The pervasive and persistent questions facing the CI community today include how to:
- Design and build an intelligence program that provides the greatest chance of long-term success (or at least survival).
- Enable its managers to become trusted advisors to leadership in the organization.
- Simultaneously execute its value-proposition for both strategic and tactical customers.
CI teams today must cover more territory than the poles of their mission – that is, “librarian versus strategist.” For an intelligence team to deliver effectively and efficiently on their charter they must provide no less than total information awareness of the marketplace, plus risk management and strategy support to company planners, while also keeping all the balls in the air for the organization to compete in the zero-sum business matters of front-line sales and marketing. The key question remains: HOW?!
The issue of sustainability
Why do some CI programs succeed while others fail to find their place and are devoured in the next round of cost-cutting?
I have always felt this invariably extends from the original drivers of any intelligence program’s charter and the reasons it was founded in the first place. When the answers escape us as to why there’s a CI program in the first place, that’s a signal there’s trouble afoot. If the CI program itself (or any single member of the team, in fact) can’t come up with a purpose behind their very existence, then it can’t be assumed anyone else can either.
When we boil down this issue of sustainability of value-add, the fundamental truth remains: even if your products and services are valued by many, they must still add value to those funding the program or your resources will, inevitably, go away.
It’s more than a little ironic to think that, when the growth of an organization’s market for its products and services is constricted by a tight economy – and, almost by definition, competitive pressures reach their zenith – the intelligence team so often appears on the list of planned cutbacks. Why? What can be done about it?
Demonstrating value
The old argument about demonstrating bottom-line value to the organization is not without merit here. Certainly, most such quantifiable observations do hold water: if return-on-investment isn’t clearly demonstrable, it’s as likely as not the CI program will be considered expendable, at least when times are tough.
So, track record and performance evaluations have something to do with it. In terms of the “soft” contributions to overall market awareness and decision-support for customers around the organization, matched with the ability to quantify those contributions, we need to provide for such measurements, at least in hindsight. This remains a challenge even with better-developed ROI models for functions such as sales force support where we have more tangible metrics like “effective lead-to-close ratio” changes to benchmark against.
However, it is a persistent belief among many that the actual intelligence output produced for one’s internal customers must be considered qualitatively indispensable by those customers in order for the program to succeed. Bottom line for intelligence customers: “help me compete and win, or you’re as doomed as the rest of us.”
Process vs. outcome
Why then, do intelligence best-practices focus so single-mindedly on the process-perspective while virtually ignoring the outcome-perspective? Well, explaining the process side of the intelligence mission is where the rubber meets the road. Those new to the field need to learn HOW to do CI work, more so or at least as much as they need to know WHAT work needs to be done.
Sure, people need to know how to execute on their mission. Still, most new CI practitioners consider themselves relative experts within a year or two and quickly tire of monotonous introductory and elementary know-how in getting the job accomplished.
The chief problem with this process-centered intelligence philosophy is that it has zero-resonance with intelligence customers. It’s the reason why intelligence customers STILL ask for “everything there is to know about X.” What’s missing in this approach are strong connections with intelligence users in terms of “So-What-Factor.” If you’re new to the term, it’s CI slang for the subconscious question circling in the minds of those you’re trying to help out when you hand them your work.
Outcome-driven CI
A lot can be learned from CI service providers in understanding outcome-driven CI. While assuming a common interest with corporate CI practitioners, the vendor community must constantly be driven by the ability to sell capabilities to produce a specific outcome for a particular business problem. Failing that, we fail to eat… a simple and sobering fact of life.
An entrepreneurial approach to acting as a kind of “internal consultant” should then drive the CI practitioner, with a focus not on the process of getting the intelligence job done, but with an eye toward the outcome the customer is seeking produced for them.
Outcome-driven CI is always based on a specific business problem or opportunity that requires an equally-specific solution for effective execution. Sure, it’s high-risk; but high-reward undertakings usually are. Taking such an approach in a slow and deliberate way can allow both parties to become more comfortable with the process side of working together, while slowly building a trusted-advisor relationship with the people being supported.
No bulletproof solution yet
The CI vendor marketplace has done its best to support clients in the corporate practitioner community with decent success. Yet the reality today is that, we face a long road ahead to help “bulletproof” CI operations from cost-cutting pressures. After a protracted period of downsizing among the CI corps at larger transnational organizations, even the small- and medium-sized enterprise market for CI services has been hit with significant cost-control pressure. Results are more important than ever and consolidation risk is at its peak.
I’ve presented admittedly anecdotal arguments about the problem of why CI programs seem so ephemeral and the effect of a process-centered philosophy versus an outcomes-centered or blended approach. Likewise, I have to say, the consultant community has a lot to account for in its shortcomings to clients by pushing such a heavy dose of process over product.
Let’s take a parting glance at the CI software marketplace. In the absence of real leadership in a CI group from an outcomes-perspective, the chief reason that a newly-chartered CI program invests in infrastructure such as “CI software” has been to buy a turnkey process, rather than build one that works for their peculiar circumstances and accomplishes their ultimate goals. Since setting up an intelligence function is difficult, it’s a lot easier to begin instead by looking for software and all the process-focus built into it, rather than do the harder work of defining the process and then applying the right tools to the job at hand.
Still, CI practitioners must discover that, even the best-equipped and customer-engaged intelligence team can suffer cutbacks and not always with good reason. In the end, despite the need for a fair amount of navel-gazing at process factors, final judgments lie in learning to satisfy customer outcomes in order to survive long enough to add value to the organization. CI professionals must think in terms of effective outcomes, which is all that really matters in the end.
Arik Johnson is Managing Director of Aurora WDC, an intelligence outsourcing and support bureau he founded in 1995. Contact Arik or learn more at www.AuroraWDC.com/arik.htm
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