9i am scip Vol. 4 | Issue 2 | Summer 2017

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STEPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR INTERNAL COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE FUNCTION6

By Beau Oliver

Establishing an internal function to address competitive intelligence (CI) enables you to understand competitors’ strategies, determine their relative position in the market, and leverage insights strategically to maximize your own business advantage. Maybe you already have a CI function in place or perhaps you are thinking about implementing one. Either way, this article will provide a useful six-step roadmap to help you optimize and enhance your CI function by effectively harnessing competitive, market, and business intelligence to develop actionable insights and inform strategic decisions.

Drawing from Cipher’s 20+ years of experience in helping clients to make better, faster decisions, we recommend the following six-step process:

1. Assess capabilities and prioritize efforts

2. Strengthen the core team

3. Invest in a portfolio of resources

4. Standardize processes and procedures

5. Focus on strategic value

6. Measure, monitor and refine

Assess capabilities and prioritize efforts

This is about doing the “headwork” before the “footwork” and evaluating where the CI function can best add value. Honestly assess existing capabilities and expertise and identify gaps that can be filled with development or recruitment. Conduct benchmarking to understand how peer organizations and industry leaders conduct CI. This can be done by leveraging current employees with past experience, with competitors, or with other organizations; by tapping into peer groups, industry associations, and other relevant third parties. The most critical component of this step is to identify and document key business challenges and CI requirements via internal interviews, surveys, and networking. Then, prioritize efforts and allocate resources to prepare for efficient execution.

Read on to learn more about what is involved in all six essential steps.

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6 Steps to Optimize Your Internal Competitive Intelligence Function<<>>6 Steps to Optimize Your Internal Competitive Intelligence Function

Five Questions to Ask

To help create a realistic assessment of what the CI requirements are for your organization, ask your team these questions:

1. What is the problem we are trying to solve and what resources do we need to help us solve it?2. Who will be the core users of our CI services?3. What specific user benefits will they expect?4. What part of our business will see the most benefit from our CI services? The least?5. What specific criteria should we use to measure ROI?

Ideally, your core team will be made up of a mix of internal and external hires with different backgrounds and experience. Hire to fill immediate needs in capabilities and skill sets and provide development opportunities to expand existent capabilities. Pinpoint formal and informal support throughout the organization by networking and identifying knowledge experts within your organization and across divisions. Focus on building a network that includes diversity of perspectives and skill sets. Find ways to aggregate the information from across the organization and disseminate insights back out to the field to make the most impact.

Building a highly-effective CI function requires an investment in resources. Specifically:

• Knowledge Management and CI SoftwareThese enables CI professionals to quickly and effectively translate intelligence into an effective strategy to analyze market trends, the existing competitive landscape, and future scenarios.

• Collaboration ToolsThese allow the CI team to coordinate with non-CI employees while supporting critical functions such as collaborating on a key intelligence topic or coordinating with sales professionals in the field.

• Open Source and Paid DatabasesThe volume of databases available today offer a wealth of intelligence on markets, customers, and competitors. Finding the right resource may take time, but the payoff comes with significantly expanded information.

• Third-Party ProvidersSuch partnerships with software and research vendors can help keep overall capabilities high, and total resource costs low. They also help to augment existing personnel or systems, freeing internal resources to focus on key issues.

Standardizing processes and procedures makes the CI function sustainable and efficient. We recommend that you:

• Formalize CI Roles and ResponsibilitiesDefine recurring processes incurred by the core team, vendors, and tools, and document their required inputs to make aggregation of information as easy as possible.

• Establish and Outline Well-defined ProtocolsStandardize and document all processes and procedures for intelligence requirement gathering, collection, classification, monitoring, analysis, collaboration, and distribution.

• Standardize Internal Forms and ReportingStandard forms and reporting allow the CI team to easily distribute insights throughout the organization, while giving non-CI employees an easy way to submit their input back to the CI team; leverage technology to garner inputs across the organization.

The demands of a CI team can be overwhelming. Focus on providing strategic value to the business by:

• Balancing Immediate and Long-term RequirementsAssess what is urgent versus important by being a “Fire Inspector” rather than a “Fire Fighter.” Understand and be able to articulate the strategic implications of the intelligence and tie all efforts to the future-state of the market and business strategy.

While this might seem like an obvious final step, it is remarkable how often we see CI functions stuck in the weeds of the immediate burning priority. Put the following protocols in place to keep your CI function on track to add maximum value to the business:

• Identify, Measure and Track Key MetricsQuantify the qualitative value the CI function provides to constantly build and enhance your business case and business value. Establish and formalize a feedback loop with all stakeholders.

• Reassess, Refine and ImproveEstablish a continuous improvement program and conduct networking, internal surveys, and other research on an ongoing basis. Identify gaps and prioritize efforts for improvement.

As Figure 1 below outlines, asking fundamental questions to evaluate and reprioritize key elements of the CI function is essential.

2 Strengthen the core team

3 Invest in a portfolio of resources

4 Standardize processes and procedures

5 Focus on strategic value

6 Measure, monitor and refine

• Delivering a Point Of ViewBe prescriptive with analysis by sharing perspective and providing recommendations. Focus on trend analysis, monitor for disruption, and provide actionable insights and recommendations.

GETTING IT RIGHT BRINGS REAL BUSINESS BENEFITS

Having an optimized CI function will enable your team of professionals to provide actionable intelligence that directly relates to your strategic goals and enables the achievement of better business results. They will be able to positively impact revenues and organization initiatives by continuously monitoring your business’ external environment and sharing key findings and analysis, so that your organization can gain sustainable competitive advantage and market share. Get it right and the business benefits come directly to your door.

Lessons from Optum

Optum, a health services and innovation company, partnered with Cipher to improve the capability of its CI function by learning to do more with less. We interviewed Vicki Osborne, Vice President of Market Research & Competitive Intelligence at Optum to hear first-hand of their lessons of experience. Vicki identified five milestones in the process to create greater efficiency.

FIGURE 1: Reassess and Prioritize Key Elements

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1. Develop a Self-Serve Option“Our goal was to build a centralized solution that allowed our team to do the work once and share it with multiple employees who could benefit from it. We also built tools in our system to allow employees to personalize the experience. This system helped us to support multiple stakeholders more efficiently while allowing us to focus on bigger priorities.”

2. Focus on Priorities“If you don’t focus your efforts today on your company priorities, or you are unsure what those priorities are, make sure you find them and compare where you spend your efforts versus the company priories. You may find that you have some adjustments to make.”

3. Develop Best Practices“These best practices – standardized dashboards, company profiles, templates, and report process and procedures for updating and communicating – helped us to be more proactive versus reactive.”

4. Create Intake Process“This intake process helped us say ‘no’ to work. It allowed us to say this request is not tied to a company or a department priority; therefore, this will not be a project that we will complete.”

5. Show Value“We do this by developing quarterly reports for particular key leaders that we support. I like to say, these reports show ‘what we’ve done for you lately.’ We not only produce these reports, but we schedule time with the leader to review the reports with them. This has helped us build stronger partnerships with our stakeholders as well as ensuring they are aware of all the great work we do every day for them.”

Most organizations find there is no shortage of information coming in from every department (BD, Sales, IT, HR, R&D, and so on), but the opportunity is lost when nothing is done with it. Without a centralized effort to share or analyze this volume of information it oftentimes sits dormant and valuable insights simply go to waste. Empowering a person or a group to ensure this information makes it in to the right hands is essential.

ABOUT THE AUTHORBeau Oliver is the Chief Operating Officer at Cipher, innovative consultancy focused on delivering competitive intelligence services and technology solutions that help our clients make smarter, faster decisions.

Leveraging over 20 years of experience, our team of experts serves as a trusted partner to the world’s greatest companies. He can be reached at b.oliver@cipher-sys.com and 410-412-3325. Visit www.cipher-sys.com.

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