If you’re going to be in Washington, DC on the evening of Thursday, October 22 please join us for the inaugural event of the Intelligence Collaborative. The title and the topic are “Social Media and Next Generation Intelligence.” You can read more about the event and register here.
The Intelligence Collaborative is a nascent professional collaboration and networking group for intelligence professionals and those in related fields. We are purposefully casting a very wide net in this group’s mission. Our target audience encompasses professionals engaged or interested in commercial intelligence, government intelligence, military intelligence, investigative journalism, strategists of all flavors, fraud investigators and librarians. I’m sure I’m leaving some people out in that summary, and if you feel remotely interested feel free to check things out. The event is free, and you can read more about the concept originally launched by my friend Eric Garland on the Competitive Intelligence Community on Ning. You can also take a view of Eric’s video introduction to the Intelligence Collaborative here:
There will be a brief set of presentations at tomorrow’s event. One of the reasons these events will be brief is because we will be using the Pecha Kucha format: 20 slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds. This has in itself been a great learning experience for me, because 20 seconds is NOT a lot of time. You’ve got to be concise, get your points across very quickly and think very carefully about how you will pull everything together. And you’ve got to practice like nobody’s business. You can see a preview of my presentation here:
I had a great time delivering my guest lecture to the Competitive Intelligence class at Johns Hopkins University tonight. My slides on my favorite competitive analysis frameworks are here.
As a child growing up in the 1980s I remember the classic Dunkin Donuts commercials with Frank the Baker (“Time to make the doughnuts.”). This was one of those memorable commercials, and seems somewhat relevant to some popular misconceptions about what competitive intelligence is.
This weekend I’ve been working feverishly to recreate my presentation on “Using the Internet to Research Private Companies” for my upcoming SCIP webinar. I’ve been applying Andrew Abela’s Extreme Presentation method that results in a more coherent “story” and also results in much more attractive and meaningful graphic slides. I used this approach for my presentation at the Frost & Sullivan Competitive Intelligence MindXChange in January and was very happy with the results. One of my goals for this presentation is that I want to encourage researchers to move from thinking about requests for specific information and focusing more on the motivating decision that they are trying to inform.
I have been looking at this concept recently based on some observations I’ve been pulling together about some cognitive biases that occur when competitive intelligence tasking is focused strictly on finding specific information about the market or a competitor versus inquiries and support based on decision support. While I’m not going to go into this topic in detail in the webinar, I did take some time to capture some quick thoughts on the cognitive biases that I have observed behind information-driven inquiry from CI customers:
Over-estimate the level of specificity required
Over-estimate the level of precision required/possible
Over-value quantitative information
Over-estimate the need for “up-to-the-minute” facts over historical trends
Value the tactical and devalue strategic
Under-estmate ethical considerations, up to and including advocating for industrial espionage under-estimate cost
Under-estimate timeframe required for information collection
Emphasize adherence to requirements over results
Emphasize information over analysis, reject external opinion
Over-reliance on individual pieces of data or information, often from unqualified or unverified sources
Significant confirmation bias– seek specific information to prove intuitive conclusions or justify decisions already made
Over-emphasize the need to move quickly over confirmation of accuracy of information or quality of analysis
Admittedly there is a lot of redundancy and overlap in that list. As I refine the concept for a new project and really get down to specific cases and examples I am sure the list will be both narrowed and focused. In a nutshell I relate these cognitive biases back to the tyranny of the urgent over the important.
Good CI managers and practitioners are going to be challenged always to push back against the information-driven approach to client inquiry. The sometimes subjective nature of “good” collection and “quality” analysis actually gives me a degree of sympathy for the client who expresses his or her requests for support in terms of access to information. It is much easier to answer the question “Did I get what I requested?” if I express my request in terms of tangible information. The decisions that need to be made are often very sensitive in nature, and the desire to compartmentalize those considerations is certainly justifiable. All of these very understandable preferences lead us to a very sub-optimal destination where practitioner time and effort is wasted to deliver something that doesn’t really address the client’s need.
New CI practices and employees effectively have to earn the permission to be decision support consultants by going above and beyond traditional information-driven requests. They must also somehow do this without falling into the trap of becoming so good at meeting information-driven expectations that they become typecast as purveyors of information as opposed to the true decision support role that CI really is intended to be. Key to doing this is to anticipate the decision requirement that drives the information request and do “well enough” on the information but go above and beyond in providing it in a firm form that also provides some quick-win analysis.
There’s a lot more here, and probably more than I can go into in one blog entry. I’m particularly interested in seeing if any of my fellow CI practitioners and vendors have any thoughts, experiences or cases along these lines of moving a client from information-driven requests to an inquiry framework based on decision support.
I have been ignoring the blog the past few weeks largely to focus on a couple of efforts I am working on for SCIP. In the interim I hope that the active sharing of news items I find on Google Reader and Twitter that run along the sidebar of this blog. I am a religious user of both platforms and they really do serve a niche to give me a means to share items of interest between blog posts or when I don’t have enough time, inclination or insight to justify a full blog entry.
One of the projects that I’ve been working on is an article on Web 2.0 and CI that I needed to get out the door and kept me up until 2 AM Thursday night. The article is probably going to be in the March/April issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine. Some of the main points that I try to convey in this article are the basics of Web 2.0 and the consequences of network effects, transparency and open platforms on established business models.
I also try to make the point in this article that Web 2.0 platforms increase the need and importance of active, real-time reputation monitoring. This is a difficult tight-rope to walk, because one of the dynamics I am trying to convey related to corporate policies related to employee use of Web 2.0 platforms (both inside and outside the enterprise) is that heavy-handed strategies won’t work. My challenge is creating an appropriate sense of urgency around active reputation monitoring and management with the knee-jerk reflex to “lock it down” that one observes in command-and-control oriented corporate structures.
The downside to the command and control approach is that it comes with a hard-to-measure cost in employee efficiency, satisfaction and retention. Ham-handed anti-web 2.0 policies are signals to the market (and employment is still a market even if it’s more of a buyer’s market these days) of the value in which the corporation holds individual employees. The best and the brightest want to go where they are going to be recognized as individuals, allowed to innovate, allowed to pursue individual initiative and rewarded for their efforts. Heavy-fisted policies about participation and social networks tell these stellar employees that this will not happen here. It also sends a message to market watchers that a corporate structure lacks the ability to take advantage of bottom-up innovation. When the recovery does happen I would like to think investors will see these qualities as indicators of staying power and the ability of a firm to generate growth and higher returns on investments.
One of my Saturday morning rituals is to sync the iPod with the podcasts that have been captured over night, and the first podcast I listen to each Saturday morning is WNYC’s On the Media.
Today I heard a story on a group of newspaper executives that are banding together to make the case that the newspaper industry is not suffering as much as some of us might believe from the coverage of this industry in the media in something called the Newspaper Project. Commentary by Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierne makes a strong case for the value and potential of historically-printed journalism to make the transition to digital platforms. The real take-away for me as a CI guy was Tierney sharing this anecdote (not a direct quote from a transcript but written from my memory):
Somebody asked Lorne Michaels recently what was the competition to “Saturday Night Live” and he said “Guitar Hero.”
This highlights a case I try to make very forcefully when I speak to business people and CI professionals, with varying degree of success. That fundamental truth is that your competition is any entity that can deliver the same fundamental value to the customer that you do.
On the surface this sounds obvious. Most executives and even CI professionals I speak to still operate under the assumption that their competitors look like themselves. If we’re a capital-intensive, massively scaled, publicly-traded company then all of our competitors will also be capital-intensive, massively-scaled, publicly-traded companies. They’ll deliver value using the same technology and processes we use to deliver value. They will extract revenue from their customers the same way we extract value. The only questions for competitive strategy are “How do we compare in terms of technology features to their offering?” and “What is our price position?”
I have seen this mindset up-close. Several years ago I told a product manager at a capital-intensive, massively-scaled, publicly traded company that he needed to watch out for disruption to his pricing power from a rising band of capital-light (software-based), exponentially-scalable (peer-to-peer network effect and viral marketing), venture-funded start-up. ”Hell, we don’t need to worry about them,” he drawled. ”We deliver an enterprise-grade service with high levels of availability and quality they’ll never be able to meet.” That competitor now delivers a much higher-quality product that is feature-rich and benefits from considerable network effects that have enabled its platform to achieve massive scale. Did I mention it’s much, much cheaper than the “enterprise-grade” solution that now pales by comparison in terms of features and quality?
Your unseen competitor might be a private company funded by angel or venture capital– or even a bootstrapped entrepreneur. It could be a non-profit or an open source provider. Your competitor could be your customer deciding they can deliver the value they get from you themselves. Your latent competition could be other necessities that are higher-priority for customers’ in these difficult economic times. Executives and CI professionals need to expand their concept of “competition” if they are going to maintain or grow revenues and profits.
Jeff Jarvis has a new book out called What Would Google Do. I have not had the pleasure of reading this book yet (it’s on my Audible wish list). The premise is very intriguing: think of the Google model for disruption and innovation and ask yourself “If Google was going to enter my industry, what innovation would they use to disrupt the existing business model?”
How would Google use IT to leverage customer activity such as search or service inquiries to actually generate value and create a self-reinforcing process?
Is there a way Google could give away your product or service and generate revenue from advertising or some other revenue model?
What sort of “ecosystem” would Google create by opening up parts of the business process to partners, customers and even potential competitors in a way that captures value of everyone’s efforts for Google and its customers?
These are just three examples off the top of my head. As I look at any number of industries I see ways to “Google-fy” their business. I also see the potential inside of companies to apply the same models to business processes to achieve greater efficiency and improve employees’ ability to do their jobs.
We’ve been able to become very complacent in recent decades, and there is a lot of waste and fat in our operations. Customers have been accepting of higher-cost enterprise-grade solutions that today pale in comparison to low-cost “prosumer” offerings. They’re going to demand pricing in line with their real needs or turn to disruptive providers. Companies are struggling to cut costs and are laying off employees and will need to find ways to make their remaining employees sufficiently productive. To do these things more companies should think like Google and other scary disruptive competitors and be ready to disrupt themselves.
The economic environment is going to force a change in the DNA of how successful businesses think, and it’s not going to be an option of executives to wait out the recession for a return to the equilibrium with which we have become so comfortable. These times call for bold, disruptive action if companies are going to come out the other side of the recession prepared for growth.
So often the government intelligence types get the Hollywood treatment. Now corporate espionage gets the treatment. How do I know it’s corporate espionage and not competitive intelligence? Because CI, while being something I find a lot of fun, is so not sexy. A movie portraying Clive Owen using LinkedIn to identify primary research sources or Julie Roberts updating her corporate SWOT doesn’t sound like a blockbuster even to me.
It does look like a fun movie, though. I’m sure it will find its way onto my Netflix que.
Two weeks ago I had the great chance to attend and speak at the Frost & Sullivan Competitive Intelligence MindXChange. The topic that I was asked to speak on was on ways that companies can anticipate and evaluate competitive threats to their global growth strategies. I wanted to share the (slightly redacted) slides from that presentation.
My main themes can be summarized as follows:
Managers must recognize other markets are distinct from their home market.
Managers’ intuition is an inadequate mechanism to develop a global growth strategy.
Focus on tight customer segmentation to identify opportunities that suit your established strengths.
Evaluate your capabilities in the context of your target market, because strengths in your home market may be weaknesses in your target market.
Incorporate local perspective into your CI and strategy practice.
On February 25 at 12h00 Noon Eastern I will be reprieving an updated version of the very successful webinar I delivered for the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals on using the Internet to research private companies. Interested parties can register for the event at the SCIP web site. I’m particularly excited about some of the updates that I’m going to be able to detail new methods and tools to research private companies using social networks.
I really enjoy delivering training such as this and sharing some of the secrets that I use for researching private companies of all sizes. Conducting research on small, private companies is much more challenging than researching large, public companies. The obvious distinction is the availability of SEC and other securities filings for public companies that contain a wealth of information about operations and performance. Using secondary sources to research private companies requires a lot of creativity.
The principal message that I try to convey in each of my webinars or presentations about Internet research is to have a plan. Being smart about how you are going to spend your time, what sources you are going to use and what you can realistically expect to find on the Internet is critical to success. Sometimes stakeholders need to be reminded that not everything is available on The Google. My first rule of thumb for Internet research is that if there is no reason for a person to put a piece of information on-line it won’t be on-line. People and companies make information available for self-serving reasons such as promotion, recruiting or because they need to comply with legal requirements.
Finally, secondary research and OSINT do not stand alone. Primary collection and HUMINT are critical for gaining real insight about private companies, and that really cannot be avoided. Secondary sources can provide some great guidance on the best primary resources you should be interviewing, what questions you should be asking them and how you should evaluate the information they provide to you. No amount of primary or secondary collection should stand alone without analysis: what does the information mean to us, what might come of all this and what should we do about it?
I hope readers of this blog will be able to join us for this webinar. I’m going to try to find an opportunity to present the webinar live to a group of local attendees to offer some face-to-face interaction. Watch this space for updates.
Last January Eric Garland of Competitive Futures and I put on a joint event for the local chapters of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals and World Futures Society. We pulled together a set of lead panelists, including some of the guys from Intellipedia, the US government intelligence community’s innovative collaboration platform. We abandoned some of the standard structures of a presentation to take the event in an almost unconference direction. The discussions revolved around application of Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration for the production of intelligence. We called the event “New Ways of Knowing.” The session was a great success with a very interactive exchange and registrations at above room capacity (whoops!).
On January 28, 2009 we will be holding “New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ and highlighting application of Web 2.0 and social media to primary research, secondary research, analysis and communications of competitive intelligence. Keep your eyes on the SCIP Greater Washington Chapter blog for updates on the event as they become available.
