Introduction to Competitive Intelligence Portals
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Transcript of Introduction to Competitive Intelligence Portals
Introduction to Competitive Intelligence Portals
The What, Why and How of Using IT Tools to Support Your Intelligence Work
By Jesper Martell & Gabriel Anderbjörk, Comintelli
About Us
Comintelli is a Swedish software company that provides systems and platforms for market and competitive intelligence.
Jesper Martell Founder & CEO, Comintelli
Gabriel Anderbjörk Founder & CFO, Comintelli
Agenda
• 1. What and Why? (10 min) – What is a CI portal
– Why do you need one?
• 2. How does a portal support the Intelligence process? (20 min) – Planning
– Connecting Sources
– Analysis
– Processing & Distribution
• 3. How do you select an Intelligence Portal that suits your requirements? (20 min) – Key Features
– Dealing with IT
– Suppliers
• Questions & Answers (10 min)
What is Competitive Intelligence (CI)?
• It´s not a 007 operation
• It´s not reading tons of newspapers
• It´s not bribing employees of competitors
It’s:
The process of systematically
gathering, analyzing and managing information
about the market & business environment that is used
to improve an organizations competitive advantage.
What is an Intelligence Portal?
• Single, centralized IT platform for: – Collection
– Storage
– Processing
– Dissemination
• Both internal and external information
• Automates your CI process and frees up time for analysis.
• Support the intelligence work by being a one stop shop allows self service.
• Helps build up an intelligence culture
• Excellent marketing tool for CI
Why do you need a CI Portal?
Who are the users?
C-level executives
Intelligence Network
All Employees
Buy-in! Engagement! Awareness!
Planning &
Direction
Collection of
Sources
Process & storage
Analysis
Dissemination
The Intelligence Cycle
What information is important for CI? • A CI Taxonomy consists of topics that
reflects the industry and highlights information that is important to the organization.
• Intelligence Topics are NOT based on what available information is about, but rather on what the users need.
• This means that there may e.g. be empty topics with no information in a CI taxonomy.
3. Processing
• Indexing and tagging
• Approving and editing
• Assessing relevancy
• Recommending
• Translating
• Selecting content for different target groups
4. Analysis
• Visualize the content and its development over time and in context graphically.
• Support standard analytical methods; SWOT, Porter 5, Benchmarks, etc.
5. Dissemination
• Distribute relevant intelligence to the right persons at the right time.
• User friendly! Easy!
• Automated Alerts
• Reports and Newletters
Selecting an Intelligence portal
• Many different options available
• What suits a company best depends on its CI process and organization
• Different vendors have different focus and strengths
• You need to have a good understanding of what your organization needs now and in future
Evolution of CI Portals
E-mail and Shared folders are main methods of sharing and storing information.
Ad hoc deliverables and little coordination or structure.
Common intranet is used as central storage and access.
Web (eg Google Alerts) are used to collect information.
Newsletters and reports generated.
Web based CI portal provides access to structured (taxonomy) information
Systematic monitoring of external sources
E-mail alerts are used to notify users.
Internal information and primary information also included in one single place.
Collaboration among users.
Multiple dashboards and acess groups.
Single Sign On
Mobile interfaces
Analysis tools are used to visualize information.
Expertise location and Gamification aspects
Well integrated with other systems
Active social sharing.
Informal
Basic
Intermediate
Advanced
World Class
Dealing with the IT department
• Policy Compliance – Security concerns
– Favored suppliers
– Design guidelines
• Integrations with other systems
• Overhead IT costs (servers)
• Time and prioritizations
• Either dont involve IT at all or involve IT very early
But can’t you just Google it...
• Google makes us smarter and stupider at the same time…
• Relevance? Google is paid ads and popularity driven
• Sources? Google does not index every page on internet. Does not cover all sources you need. Many sources are not available on internet.
• Processing? Many tools are better at aggregating in more meaningful ways from a CI perspective (eg Google searches are affected by history, location, browser version, cookies, etc)
• Security? You leave traces behind…
But we can build it ourselves...
• Build you own or buy ready made CI software? – Yes, building your own CI portal enables a
perfect match to your current work process
– BUT developing your own requires software skills and maintenance resources. You should focus on CI analysis
– Experience shows that it tales longer time & costs more in the long run
– Share best practices with others. You are seldom as unique as you may think…
But we have SharePoint...
• If SharePoint is already in the organization it can be worthwhile exploring the option of building something on top of it..
• But can be time consuming and epxensive
• IT are not CI experts (and viceversa).
• ”For every dollar spent on a SharePoint license you need to spend another 6-9 dollars to make it work”
- Microsoft website
• Content aggregation
– Abillity to connect content from internal and external sources
– Ability to add RSS feeds and web crawlers
• Content management
– Ability to produce reports
– Ability to input via web and mobile interface
• Classification
– Ability to manually and/or automatically filter/tag/archive content (taxonomy)
• Search
– Ability to free text search across all content types in one place
– Ability to rank by date/relevancy
• User experience and distribution
– Ability to access via web or mobile device
– Ability to create personalized e-mail alerts
Key features to look for:
• Visual Analytics
– Ability to visualize using charts, trends, tag clouds, heat maps, etc.
– Ability to benchmark profiles
• Collaboration
– Ability to comment/recommend articles
– Ability to set up different dashboards
– Ability to chat and e-mail forward
– Ability to locate other users and experts
• Administration
– Ability to set up users, topics, feeds by yourself
– Usage statistics
• Control & Security
– Ability to have secure user authentication
– Ability to encrypt stored information
– Ability to manage user access rights
– Ability to approve articles
• Scalability & Flexibility
– Ability to grow in terms of users, topics, sources
– bility to customize and integrate with third party software and content providers
Key features to look for:
7 Key Success Factors 1. Sufficient budget and
management sponsorship 2. Good understanding of user needs 3. Effective taxonomy 4. All relevant intelligence content
stored in one searchable place 5. Simple, clear user interface 6. Daily e-mail alerts (newsletter
style) 7. Internal branding and marketing
to activate users