First published on: December 22, 2015
Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers making strategic decisions for an organization.
Data driven insights and analysis play a key role in modern businesses. Information online is more accessible in an instant. Yet information which is most valuable to you and your business cannot be found on popular search engines. Generating meaningful insights from acquired information requires amplified intelligence. A survey showed 55 percent of decision makers use competitive information to compose business strategies. In a competitive platform, just in time information makes all the difference between keeping pace and getting ahead. Amplifying the intelligence of the strategist/decision maker can help the organization get a headstart. Organizations and industries prosper through improvements in competitiveness, leveraging core competencies, and competitive intelligence is at the core of the objective of improving competitive advantage.
“CI has expanded far beyond human intelligence and primary data collection at this point. CI professionals are handling market sizing, segmentation, strategic analysis to support mergers and acquisitions, and so on. Data is everywhere. The ability to make sense of it all is still a rare skill.”– SCIP Executive Director Nannette Bulger.
“Today’s analysis tools allow CI professionals to find patterns and anomalies in the data that they study in minutes rather than months.”– Peter Schlampp, Vice President of Products at Platfora, a big data analytics company.
IDC wrote in a 2014 opinion brief about a big data analytics company. “A raft of new companies that provide a range of data types – from wind speed data to data about what people are watching, reading, or listening to – are emerging to coexist with and sometimes replace more traditional data vendors in the information industry. What’s more is that organizations in many industries are curating and adding value to that content, in some cases transforming it completely and finding new ways of deriving economic value from the data. Value-added content (VAC) is an emerging market.”
An Organization’s CI consist of the issues at the center of its competitive efforts. These typically include organization strategy, business development, new talents and retention, technology, other vital topics. Intelligence is not produced merely by hitting the Internet and printing out the search results. Nor it is just the reports about litigation or facts about a competitor’s past performance. Using a data driven approach, an analyst should be able to collect and study relevant “what we know” information and convert that into meaningful “what we should do” implications for decision makers. The use of CI in analysis must then synthesize various patterns and separate industry developments to reveal the macro picture and identify appropriate actions.
In the Banking sector, fraud mechanisms grow and evolve faster than the technologies we develop to prevent them. Amplified Intelligence acts as a powerful tool to prevent frauds like money laundering.
Greater collaboration is taking place between clients and Analysts/Data Scientists to work together to collect, analyse, deliver insight and adapt strategies focussed on customers. The successful organizations and institutions of the future will be those that have a deep understanding of the markets in which they operate and competitive intelligence that can provide this intelligence.
Crediwatch is a trusted source of verified information, competitive intelligence and market data. Financial officers, marketers and business development managers and more tap into our data and insights to improve their business.
